Snakes and Ladders: Investment Banking on the Brink

[sysop]

For decades, investment bankers have held the key to untold riches -- but now they're being laid off by the tens of thousands. As the crisis forces the industry to search for a new identity, is it ready to mend its ways?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-877710.html

[banksis]

What I find intriguing is how long the house of cards took to fall.

Is there any relationship between the industry's blind acceptance of the "need" to pay the financial cowboys so much on the one hand and the failure of the Catholic church hierarchy to see its brand being tarnished by the institutional failure to rein in errant priests?

[Newspeak]

"Not everything about investment banking is bad," he says.

Surely true. It is the same thing old Nazis and communists will tell you about their systems.

Capitalism is an inhuman ideology. Investment bankers are at the top of it. Its "elite". They should "pay" for their crimes. Every single one of them.

[kogiks]

Humans have invented regulations precisely because humans have an intrinsic predisposition to evil as well as to good. Investment banks are useful to society sans their abuses. Thus the trick is to simply ensure effective regulation of investment banks that they may conduct themselves properly and be a force for good in society.