South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Felix Salmon looks at the “institutionalization of the revolving door” and finds its troubling.

It’s worth pushing back against this notion that earning a seven-figure sum on Wall Street automatically gives you a feel for markets and business — or even that in order to have a feel for markets and business, you have to earn a seven-figure sum on Wall Street. Neither is true. Advising Goldman Sachs on setting up a charitable foundation might teach people a lot about how to navigate the internal politics of Goldman Sachs, but that’s about it. And while there are certainly many highly-remunerated bankers who do know a lot about markets and business, there are equally many who don’t. Wall Street jobs tend to be hyper-specialized: a detailed knowledge of, say, the custody trail in reverse repo transactions is highly unlikely to give you any insight into the state of the US economy.
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As the testimony at the FCIC from the Goldman executives involved in the Abacus transaction shows, bankers tend to live in a highly distorted reality where the outrageous is accepted as a normal and ethical way of conducting business: insofar as working on Wall Street does give people a feel for how business is conducted, it can give people a very distorted impression indeed. Like, for instance, the impression that an annual income of $2.2 million is head-scratchingly low, rather than mind-blowingly high.