Is it just me?
Or does this not look like an opportunity?
(from The Economist) It has been a year to make even Croesus blush for the big Wall Street securities firms. Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers have all announced record profits and beaten analysts’ expectations in the process. Bloomberg, a financial-information firm, calculates that the industry will make $29.1 billion after tax in fiscal 2006, a 43% rise on last year, which was itself a bumper one. New York’s tabloids have had a field day, splashing headlines like “Sachs of Loot” and fantasising about all the things outsized bonuses could buy.
Sure there are enormous barriers to entry – especially with respect to regulation – in wholesale financial services, but $29 billion would start to seem to be worth starting to think about spending the effort to take on these barriers… On the other hand, one cannot but congratulate the men and women that achieved this remarkable success, as anyone who has worked in the industry knows, success does not come without a tremendous amount of hard work and brainpower.
Merry Christmas Wall Street. Merry Christmas the City.
