The following is from a Wall Street Journal article I found today entitled “On the Street, Disbelief and Resignation” concerning the plight of the poor investment bankers, who now have nothing to do and are barely making ends meet:
Inside what’s left of Wall Street, investment bankers are doing all they can to cope with a business that is disappearing before their eyes. Yes, there are tens of thousands of people still with jobs. They just don’t have much work. Debt and stock markets are virtually shut, merger volume is down by 28%, and whole lines of structured finance are closed for good.
WSJ’s Dennis Berman tells colleague Evan Newmark that although tens of thousands of people have managed to hold on to their jobs, there isn’t much work to go around. Instead, he says, Wall Streeters are working to appear busy. Investment banking has since become a phantom realm, where everyone is busy but no one is doing anything. In this world, status is conferred by a quality meeting, not a completed transaction; a $700,000 salary is deemed generous [my emphasis]; and an apocryphal story keeps circulating of a former J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. mortgage-securities banker now driving a forklift.
This needs to be filed with the story out of Santa Fe about a man and a wife whose request for a zoning variance was denied. First of all, they wanted to build a house on top of a scenic ridge, which right there is against the law. Secondly, they wanted it to be something like 9,500 square feet, which is an awful lot of space for two people. Naturally all this got thrown right back at them, but now the couple and their lawyers are back! They’re still trying to get a variance on the ridgetop zoning, but they’ve cut the proposed size of the house down to 8,500 square feet. The wife says they need that much room “to accommodate her husband’s wheelchair.”
All you nursing home ladies and dudes, take note!
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Those poor poor folks. They’d better be glad that they didn’t bring that variance to the planning commission that I was on. A variance for a ridge top mcmansion?? Over my dead body.
Good grief. I wonder if experiencing valley simplicity and peace could heal their priorities?