When things go well - the firm lands a big underwriting or a high-profile merger or executes a profitable trade - there is no shortage of people around to claim credit. Of course, when something goes terribly wrong - see 'Whale, London' or 'Synthetic CDO, Abacus - the senior executives disappear from the scene faster than cockroaches when the light is turned on. In return, employees get paid more working on Wall Street - without putting any personal capital at risk - than they can at almost any other job on the planet. This is not a subject open to debate on Wall Street. This is the way it is. If you don’t like that bargain, you leave. (Sorry, Greg Smith.).
Hit the link below to access the complete Bloomberg article:
Wall Street’s Great Scapegoat Hunt
William D Cohan
William D. Cohan is the author of the recently released Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World and the New York Times bestsellers House of Cards and The Last Tycoons.
Cohan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes frequently for Financial Times, Fortune, The Atlantic and The Washington Post. He worked on Wall Street as a senior mergers and acquisitions banker for 15 years. He also worked for two years at G.E. Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. The Last Tycoons won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
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