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The Incredible Shrinking Industry

As heads spin and iconic Wall Street companies disappear, the financial industry diminishes before our very eyes. How many jobs will be lost in these various shotgun marriages, bankruptcies, and shut downs? The toll will be huge--many tens of thousands, including a high percentage of big ticket bankers...

By Jonathan D. Miller | Updated on September 18, 2008

As heads spin and iconic Wall Street companies disappear, the financial industry diminishes before our very eyes. How many jobs will be lost in these various shotgun marriages, bankruptcies, and shut downs? The toll will be huge–many tens of thousands, including a high percentage of big ticket bankers and traders. Poof. And they won’t be coming back anytime soon.

Once re-energized regulators get through, all those sleight of hand transactions, which created a Wall Street fee bonanza over the past decade, will either be eliminated or become prohibitively expensive to undertake. So long credit default swaps and CDOs. When companies finally recapitalize, lending activities will be constrained by conservative underwriting requiring strong credit from borrowers, and without free flowing leverage, transaction activity will be muted for quite a while.  What’s left of the  industry won’t need all those bodies for trading, flipping, tranching, slicing and dicing. Surviving bankers may actually focus again on financing new industries, good companies,and sound real estate projects which actually create long-term value in the economy instead of stratospheric year-end bonuses.

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