Couldn't have said it better.

silver banana coming ur way

That is fantastic. 10 points to whomever the author is. Can you imagine the reaction if Jamie Dimon published this on the front page of the WSJ with his smiling portrait next to it?

OH SHITTTTTT

did anyone else think of John Galt and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged after reading that piece?

damn that's what i thought of immediately, anyways.

Awesome.

This is on dealbreaker. Personally, I whole heartedly agree. Very interesting the reactions on that site though.

could not have been said better.

Excellent post. And Obama sucks.

I love it!!!! Diamond Banana if there were one.

Personally, I must disagree. I find these posts/emails/thoughts so sophomoric, egocentric and ill-informed. Everything about the email is just utterly ridiculous. I could tear it apart line by line but why waste the time or energy. If I had to guess, this email wasn't written by a highly educated, intelligent and sophisticated financier but rather a glorified salesman that happens to work in finance; while I could be wrong, I hope I'm not.

Its not surprising that when I systematically checked all of the above posters user profiles, basically everyone was a "Prospective Monkey". Stop mentally masturbating the dream of being a hitter, and saying stuff like "awesome", "props", "OH SHITTTTT" and "beautiful" in reaction to "taking on the man". Is this a finance forum or a 7th grade notebook with Anarchy doodles scribbled in between class notes.

Love this so much...words cannot describe it. Although I doubt many I-Bankers would become teachers even if that was the only employable profession left

So true !!!

ke18sb, what is the problem with what's being said?

Man, Obama is doing what he has to do on this one. He doesn't want to see Wall Street crumble, he just wants to curb the abuses that have been going on.

Furthermore, the IB talent pool would not move on to pedestrian jobs like teaching and lanscaping. The people who would have to worry are consulting, Big 4 Accounting, commercial banking.

.

Thank you! Let's not forget either that New York City, the biggest city in the U.S., was founded with only one purpose in mind - TO MAKE MONEY - and it has been that way for 400 years!

So here it goes then. Why I think this is a pathetic ramblings of an uneducated douche bag.

The first two paragraphs make finance sound unsophisticated. Its almost as if the writer is conceding all it was is a giant bet that lost. This makes finance sound simplistic while making the traders that lost come off as unintelligent gamblers that ran out of luck. He is implying that traders were just playing a game and lost and people should stop whining about it. Its asinine for 2 reasons. One, finance is not that trivial. Two, if it is, then your'e admitting that traders aren't a cut above the rest, rather people that was given the keys to a car that they didn't know how to drive.

Yes, certainty you are going to apply your work ethic to a non-financially lucrative field. As if its your ethos driving you to work so hard is not the money. Laughable.

It's presumptions to assume that the same skill set to banking applies to teaching and manual labor. Just because you can sell junk bonds don't mean you can connect and educate children. Nor does it imply that you would be capable of doing manual labor for shitty pay. Not to mention if the author would to take on such low paying professions I'm sure he would do all of the overtime off the clock as he implies.

No one is getting a free ride of a bankers back. If a banker is hiring a service provider they are working hard for their money and usually at a low wage. Seeing as though outrageous bonus levels are a relatively new thing, and that both wall street and main street have been doing just fine for the past several decades, I'm pretty sure that the well being of the non finance professionals, whether white or blue collar will be just fine.

Again presumptuously implying that he will knock the middle class down a level. What does that even mean. The tens of thousands of traders are going displace the tens of millions of middle class workers who will just become magically poor.

Yes, you are so intelligent. Smart enough to come up with a nonsensical rant that reeks of douche bag yet does not provide any factual support and merely offers outrageous assumptions. I find it so disgusting how some people in finance are so pathetically narcissistic. Finance isn't the best of the best. That would be engineers, doctors, innovators, entrepreneurs or those that follow their true passions regardless of the pay. Not hating on finance, as I'm in it, rather pointing out that some people in finance think they are god's gift to civilization when they are nothing of the sort.

Stop drinking our own Koolaid.

We are Wall Street. waws?

carry on...

I know I don't truly understand any piece of technology more sophisticated than a lightbulb. Car salesmen don't know how to put together an engine. TV salesmen don't understand how plasma screens works. The American Airlines travel agent can't explain how a plane flies. And mortgage brokers don't understand how CDOs work. I wouldn't expect them to. A very basic understanding maybe, but not all the details.

It's not reasonable to expect sales people to understand everything about what they sell. That's just the consequence of advanced products (financial or otherwise).

Car salesmen sell cars, not engines. TV salesmen better understand how plasma screens work, and be able to tell the customer exactly what it means to the customer in a way that customers care about. The AA travel agent sells plane tickets, not planes. The mortgage broker sells mortgages, not CDO's. The bank peddling CDO's better understand what they're selling. Boeing better know how their planes are put together. Toyota better know how their engines are put together.

The comment about not buying something from a salesman that doesn't understand what he is selling is totally backward. Of course you would buy a financial product the salesman didn't understand, especially if you felt as though you understood it better than he did.

That is the entire ethos of Wall Street and trading - anyone that enters into a financial trade feels like he is the smart guy in the room, that he understands the product he is buying and its outlook better than the seller. After all, he must - if he didn't why would he be buying?

If somebody is selling something he doesn't understand and you feel he has undervalued it, that's not called fraud - that's called blood in the water. Clearly the buyers felt they were purchasing something they understood better than the seller - just turns out they were wrong. Oops.

Every transaction is a bet - that you'll win and your counterparty will lose. So clearly you hope your counterparty is as dumb as possible. Everyone involved in these complex mortgage deals were sophisticated investors that understand these dynamics. And if they didn't... well as the saying goes, there is dumb money at every table and if you don't know who it is - it's you.

Have you guys ever considered that you're being punked?

Yes, this is an over-the-top viewpoint of what some folks on Wall Street may feel, but it's no less hyperbolic than what Stephen Colbert or Borat does with neo-conservatives. Those of you who are nodding your heads in agreement are being had on a punchline that the original author of this email likely intended. The fact that so many of you guys are even agreeing to this is what the author wants - it's meant to incite and to make you guys look like complete douchebags to everyone else who isn't on Wall Street - the more you guys voice your support for this kind of sentiment, the worse you will come across without even realizing it.

It's a Gordon Gekko caricature (if that is even possible - and a fictional character no less), taking the smugness, nihilism, arrogance, presumption and self-importance to a more extreme level than reality. It's taking every single character trait people HATE about Wall Street and encapsulating it (a little to neatly) into an email.

Parody is at its most effective when the intended target doesn't even realize that they're being parodied.

Who cares if Main Street is outraged? 50% pay 0 Fed Income Taxes.

The whole issue boils down to 2 causes:

1) Moral Hazard. Regulation ain't gonna do shit as long as the financial service firms know in the back of their minds that if they royally fk up, big brotha is coming.

2) Zero skin in the game. Of course rating agencies didn't work - they got paid by the wrong people. Of course there is populist outrage. Its win win for them. Don't have money in the game, jealous of success. I

And the email was balling.

And yall might want to open up your knowledge baskets cuz imma gonna keep droppin wisdom in them.

@MBAApply - Every joke/parody/sarcasm has some truth to it. As self-righteous, oblivious and borderline ignorant that writer makes Bankers look , there is alot of truth to what he says. If Alice in Wonderland (Obama) brings down Wall Street, he's hurting Main Street more than he is hurting any seasoned Banker. Say what you want about Bankers but we know how to work long hours, come up with fancy speeches to sell a product for more than it's worth and let's face it unless you're working as a financial analyst at some bottom of the barrel community bank, you had to have graduated with a decent degree from a decent school.

Obviously wall St has always made Bankers/Traders seem like they are the smartest people on earth to justify the salaries. How else would you explain a 28 year old making half a mil bc he knows how to buy low and sell high?! Or paying a 23 yr old 70k a year to plug numbers into excel and run to Starbucks all day/night when his diploma hasn't even been printed yet. But as the person who wrote that rant stated, when a banker eats, everybody eats. I am far from being an 8-figure a year hot shot and even I tip extremely generously, have a maid, grocery delivery guy, am on a first name basis with the shoe girls at Saks and have a dog walker. I have helped pay for family members' tuition, soccer lessons, you name it. And when the earth quake hit Haiti, every last person in my department donated at least $500 simply bc one of the client service girls is haitian. I am grateful to have a job that allows me enough financial freedom to help others so I do. So imagine how many little fish are eating off the earnings of a Big fish like Fabrice Tourre or Andrew Hall?

I know 6 guys who left banking after Lehman died and they literally waltzed right into McKinsey, Apple, Accenture, Bain, etc And out of those 6, 4 of them had positions created for them with 100k + base salaries. Who do you think that hurt? Main Street. In order for a company like Accenture to make room for a $120k+ comp, that's 3- $40k positions that will either be eliminated or not filled to begin with.

The reason why I liked that rant is bc someone is finally showing what would really happen to Main Street is wall St comes crumbling down.. America has fallen into Obama's trap. He's yapping on and on about Wall Street to distract from the fact that he's less than stellar as a president. Does Wall Street need reform? Absolutely. We choked on our own Kool-Aid. But hammering down on us completely, won't fix anything.

Silver banana to moneyneversleeps2. Completely agree.