Eric says.

His audience was mostly Bloomberg employees / legacy finance people in NYC yes? A lot of people in that audience were probably nodding their heads and saying to themselves, "of course, what he says is obvious and makes loads of sense" but when push comes to shove, will they change their habits and business models by taking some of Eric's bullet points to heart and into action? Perhaps some, but its doubtful (unless the upper echelons of these companies are very adaptive and believe their businesses will die -- in the face of death people will usually consider changing)! There is a lot of friction with regard to changing corporate culture (not that Eric is trying to change his audience). Let's face it -- if you were to tell John Mack at Morgan Stanley a year ago that his business was going to die in September 2008 due in part to some of the points Eric made (e.g., transparency) and along the lines of Roubini-like speak, John Mack would have laughed at you. John Mack is no longer laughing and if it weren't for his pal Paulson, Morgan Stanley would have bit the dust just like Lehman did. Because of the moral hazard of Paulson not allowing Morgan and Goldman to die like Lehman, then the John Mack's of the world will really not learn any lessons (because Daddy Paulson will always bail us out no matter what). Roubini's argument is solid: he stated in September that these "shadow banks" never had a successful business model. But the shadow banks could live on for quite some time because of LACK of transparency (the antithesis of what Eric was stating in the his presentation).

You can tell a lot about the audience from the questions they ask. At the end of Eric's presentation, did you listen to the audience questions? If not, you should and then you should post this on you blog because its the questions (the "search queries" so-to-speak) that are much more interesting IMHO than about what Eric stated (for some of us you're right, what Eric said was old hat). The audience, in their questions, were much more concerned about: 1.) U.S. politics such as the people who kept asking him about endorsing Obama (yawn), 2.) preservation of legacy financial news publishing agencies and how to make money in the news business and news as a "loss leader" (not surprising right, considering the speech was at Bloomberg)? Good heavens do we REALLY need Bloomberg and Reuters terminals anymore as the Internet becomes a ubiquitous utility?

Perhaps the biggest shocker is for all the people in finance who moved physically to NYC because when the asset bubbles created the illusion that life was great, many of these people thought they and NYC was the center of the world. Oops, not any more!