Grab some tissue, you're going to need it:
Wall Street headhunter Michael Karp said he met last month over tea at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with a trader who made $500,000 last year at one of the six largest U.S. banks.
The trader, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate, complained that he has worked harder this year and will be paid less. The headhunter told him to stay put and collect his bonus.
“This is very demoralizing to people,” Karp said. “Especially young guys who have gone to college and wanted to come onto the Street, having dreams of becoming millionaires.”
Sadness, sadness everywhere:
Ilana Weinstein, CEO of search firm IDW Group LLC, said in an interview that she had nothing good to offer a trading executive in his early 40s who complained last month about morale at his bank, one of the six largest in the U.S.
“This is the first time that people don’t necessarily believe it will get better,” said Weinstein, whose Third Avenue office has two exits “like a high-end plastic surgeon” to assure discretion. “Compensation has been recalibrated.”
Ah, but at least we have an explanation:
“They’re not going to make the kind of money they wanted,” said William Hambrecht, chairman of San Francisco- based WR Hambrecht & Co., who designed the Dutch auction of Google Inc.’s 2004 initial public offering. “I’m not sure people really have come to terms with the fact that what we had was a financial bubble.”
And, they're fighting back, against regulation and the scorn:
That isn’t diminishing lobbying efforts to soften rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, which would reduce risk, curtail proprietary trading and force more transparency in the $601 trillion derivatives market. Large financial institutions have been “exceedingly aggressive at trying to roll back reform” and have largely succeeded, said Greenlight Capital Inc. President David Einhorn, 42, who bet against Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in the months before that firm’s collapse.
Leon Cooperman, the first Goldman Sachs Asset Management CEO and head of hedge fund Omega Advisors Inc. in New York, said Wall Street has been “excessively” blamed and President Barack Obama has “continued to project himself as anti-wealth, anti- business and socialist in his leanings.”
Phelan said he’s worried about “social unrest.”
“My taxes are going up,” he said. “Everybody hates me."
Continue reading at Bloomberg...
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Song - Jump You Fuckers - By Gene Burnett
This one pretty much speaks for itself.
- "Hey Mr. Wall Street on the 50th floor..."