Blackomen, I do not work in finance, but you might want to read Michael Lewis's book Liar's Poker, in which he describes his experiences working as an investment banker in the late 1980s. Here is a related quote from a long, but worth reading article written by him:
"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."
- The End, by Michael Lewis
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/n ... reets-Boom
Another interesting article by Michael Lewis,
The Man Who Crashed the World
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feat ... /aig200908
One more article, by a different writer (Andy Kessler),
Lehman And Meritocracy
http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/14/lehman ... ssler.html
Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide to do.
09 Sep 2009, 7:22 pm
