The End of Wall Street

Check out the cover story from the February 5, 2012, issue of New York Magazine entitled, "The End of Wall Street As They Knew It."
Author Gabriel Sherman writes, "...among the many dislocations Wall Street has suffered since 2008, none may have been more destabilizing than the headlines that flashed across Bloomberg terminals on the afternoon of January 17, when news leaked that Morgan Stanley would cap cash bonuses at just $125,000. A week later, Bank of America announced that it would be cutting the cash portion of its bonuses by 75 percent, giving the rest in stock. All across Wall Street, compensation is crashing. Goldman Sachs, coming off a lackluster fourth quarter, slashed compensation by 21 percent."
Now, as you can imagine, I started shedding copious tears--crocodile tears, that is--when I read that paragraph. 
Sherman continues, "No one on Wall Street liked to be scapegoated either by the Obama administration or by the Occupiers. But many acknowledge that the bubble­-bust-bubble seesaw of the past decades isn’t the natural order of capitalism—and that the compensation arrangements just may have been a bit out of whack. “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little,” a former Lehman trader said. Paul Volcker, whose eponymous rule is at the core of the changes, echoes an idea that more bankers than you’d think would agree with. “Finance became a self-justification,” he told me recently. “They made a lot of money trading with each other with doubtful public benefit.” Source: http://bit.ly/wNc7Dg
I confess that I didn't feel very sorry for those obscenely overapid social parasites who have never worked an honest day in their lives or produced anything of actual value or worth but, instead, have spun gold out of straw like so many Rumpelstiltskins.
Maybe the reforms enacted by Congress will take effect and banks--and capitalism--will return to their historical behavior.
After all, as Vanguard founder Jack Bogle stated in the article, “Reversion to the mean is the rule of the financial market.”
Jagor