future prospects

The obvious answer is no, but assuming you can manage to land a job in investment banking at a decent shop, is this a pretty good time to start your career? Lets assume that you'll be starting in July. You do your 2-3 years as an analyst and then try to move onto something else. Obviously you won't be able to gain as much experience because deal flow is down, but that should be equal across all analysts. After you finish your analyst program in 2 years, that will be 4 years since the whole financial crisis began. Do you think all those hedge funds and p/e shops will start hiring again? I realize we'll probably never get back to those glory days, but we can only go down so far before we have to go up. Would also be fair to assume you will have less competition because banks will have hired less analysts?

Obviously no one can possibly know the answer to this question. Just looking for some peoples' opinions and input on this topic.