And another Lewis column, from March, forseeing the current crisis as the inevitable result of a free-for-all on Wall Street. The punchline:
Ever since then, when extremely smart people have found extremely complicated ways to make huge sums of money, the typical Wall Street boss has seldom bothered to fully understand the matter, to challenge and question and argue.
This isn’t because Wall Street CEOs are lazy, or stupid. It’s because they are trapped. The Wall Street CEO can’t interfere with the new new thing on Wall Street because the new new thing is the profit center, and the people who create it are mobile.
Anything he does to slow them down increases the risk that his most lucrative employees will quit and join another big firm, or start their own hedge fund. He isn’t a boss in the conventional sense. He’s a hostage of his cleverest employees.
At this point you have to at least wonder if Wall Street firms should be public companies. Their complexity renders them inherently opaque. Investors are right now waking up to this fact: They will demand to be paid for opacity, and also for volatility.
The firms have been revealed to be so treacherous in bad times that the only way they survive as public companies is to make outrageously huge sums in good times. That is, as public companies, to be economically viable they are likely to be socially problematic.
If they aren’t about to go under, they are making so much money that everyone else hates them.
Something is about to give.
