The end of Wall Street?

Michael Lewis spent four years working for Salomon Brothers and wrote about it in Liar's Poker. He has now written a wonderful post-mortem on the current 'troubles' in the Cond� Nast Portfolio:

The End
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital�to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn�t the first clue.

I�d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous�which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people�s money, would be expelled from finance.

When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989�Liar�s Poker, it was called�it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.

Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.

It's a bit of a long read (nine pages) but a fascinating story and Lewis is a good storyteller. I do hope there is a good shakeup. As good as these stories are to read, the idea that people would play these kinds of games with investors money is unconscionable and unethical. That house needs cleaning...