Posted on 02/22/2009 3:09:40 PM PST by rabscuttle385
For two centuries, Wall Street survived wars, depressions, bank panics and terrorist attacks. Now Wall Street as we know it is dead. Gone.
When a healthy and thriving person dies suddenly, a medical examiner may talk to family and friends to see if the deceased had recently changed behavior in some way.
Wall Street did change radically in recent years in one notable way. Twenty or 30 years ago, it was common for the best and the brightest to be doctors or engineers. By the 2000s, they wanted to be investment bankers.
When Wall Street was run by people randomly selected from the population, it was able to survive everything. After the best and brightest took over, it died the first time that real-estate prices dropped 20 percent.
Are the two facts related? In other words, did Harvard kill Wall Street?
The suspect certainly had the opportunity. If you walked into any major Wall Street firm a year ago and randomly selected an employee, chances are that person would either be from an Ivy League school, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown and so on, or have an Masters in Business Administration, or both.
. . . . .
Philippon and Reshef went on to explore what caused the surge in wages in the financial sector. They found one of the key reasons was the increasing reliance on highly educated workers with post-graduate degrees.
(Excerpt) Read more at projo.com ...
Kevin Hasset's an idiot.
outstanding piece. Now they’re all in DC.
Note that many of the higher ups in Goldman Sachs have fled for the safety of the Federal Reserve and Treasury.
Watch them f**k that up.
They are already.
Buy gold.
PHD = piled higher and deeper. Those in the real world who interact with Ivy League grads wouldn’t let them anywhere near running a business. They make better perpetual college students. i.e. they’re worthless.
Isn’t declaring Wall Street to be dead a little premature? If anything did ‘kill’ it, it was information technology; nowadays financial services in this country are mostly decentralized, the old moniker “Wall Street” just being a convenient shorthand for banks and investment firms which in reality could be located anywhere.
Yes. Kevin Hasset is an idiot. Markets have risen and crashed for the better part of the last 300 years. Even if this is the end of this one, new ones will emerge.
But he is right about one thing, the Ivy league mentality these days. THe kids coming out of the Ivy no better than any state college, but they have a sense of entitlement that defies logic.
One thing he misses on though is why. I for one think the reason is that instead of teaching the kids about business and what makes it run, they teach things like how to hire more transgendered people, how not to get sued, and how the environment is the most important consideration in any business transaction.
Exactly, now everyone is an “investor” daytraders and little tots in “E-Trade” ads. It has become amateur hour, with people investing in stocks with ridiculous P/E ratios because the stock is “sexy.”
Actually Wall Strets not dead yet, the cowards are just hiding under there desk. We need to seek them out kick them to the streets.
The precious metals markets are doomed.
Why do you think that quote is idiotic? I think it is valid. There was a time when your education came by working your way up through the system, learning from those above you, not only from books.
Education is now centered mostly on developing theories and applying them to systems. Stupidly of course no one told these fools that theories do not belong in the real world.
Wrong. The idiot’s were the people that allowed garbage mortgages be repackaged and sold as AAA securities.
And there was a lot of it going on. The results are in.
Michael Lewis of “Liar’s Poker” fame wrote about it recently:
And the supreme narcissist of this era emerged as Our Glorious Leader.
Quite true. Wall Street is just a convenient all-encompassing euphemism for banks and investment groups. A bunch of traders on the floor of the NYSE doing the bidding of their respective brokerage houses isn’t the economy. “Wall Street” may as well refer to a guy sitting in front a computer in Modesto.
I read an article on the collapse of AIG not long ago. The guys who put together these risk models were very smart, but they made some poor assumptions—like that AIG would have a AAA rating forever.
Its always the assumptions that kill you.
I was going to argue your assertion till I read that.
Absurd. If you can't trust Harvard experts, who can you trust?
"If recession should threaten serious consequences for business (as is not indicated at present) there is little doubt that the Federal Reserve System would take steps to ease the money market, and so check the movement."
~~Harvard Economic Society, October 19, 1929
"Business will turn for the better this month or next, recovering vigorously in the third quarter and end the year substantially above normal."
~~Harvard Economic Society, May 17, 1930
Assume = Ass U Me
If I grabbed people off the street to run the Wall St. firms would they do any worse? Would they be less honest?
Hardly.
But they would be a lot cheaper and easier to train without the mush of a “higher” education.
The reason is not about the education per se. Harvard knows and teaches the same stuff that Ohio State knows and teaches. There are no secrets. The difference is that you go to an Ivy League school to meet and network with the next generation of the powerful and affluent. It's like joining the right country club.
Denizens of the Ivy League puppy farm delude themselves into thinking that because they are who they are, and they know who they know, they can do anything. Idiot Tim Geithner is a poster child for this particular character disorder.
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