A LONG TIME AGO...

when Wall Street was also booming, I recall reading a comment by a young Ivy-league educated broker. He claimed to find his job very fulfilling because it called on nearly all of his abilities. I didn't quite believe this but since I don't have first hand experience, I couldn't directly dispute it. In the years since I read that comment, I've come to think that the only real reward on Wall Street is financial and a recent story in the NYT backs that up:

And for all the talk about taxpayer-financed bonuses, a lot of junior and midlevel executives have been told that they shouldn’t expect anything but their salaries this year. In a business where your bonus is often five times your base pay, that’s devastating news. And we’re talking about a line of work in which virtually all satisfaction is paycheck-dependent.

“Fact is that this is a terrible way to make a living — except for the money,” Ken Miller, a former vice chairman at Credit Suisse First Boston and now a private investor, said. “The lifestyle is terrible — the hours, the sucking up. These guys must feel like they’re the victims of a capricious god.”

If Wall Street really is all about the money, then we shouldn't be surprised about the meager morality of the marketplace.