With painfully public resignation letter from a sanctimonious Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) employee this week, the anti-Wall Street flames have been fanned again. These greedy fat cats caused the financial crisis, got bailed out, are raking in mammoth salaries and are robbing their clients blind.
It has made some people ask recently, “Who in heck would go work for such a soulless industry?”
The answer: a lot of people.
Don’t believe the nonsensical headlines about Wall Street’s recent image problem. Most galling was the lead of a New York Times article recently that referred to a recruiting “crisis” for the big banks. Kevin Roose writes:
“The industry’s cachet, which was tarnished during the financial disaster, has been further stained by the lingering economic slowdown and a series of highly publicized industry scandals that have drawn critical attention to the big banks.”
So what? Ugly headlines are hardly new for Wall Street and its investment banks. Turn back the clock almost 30 years and you’ll find a remarkably similar environment. The U.S. was fighting out of recession in the 1980s, and junk bonds and the S&L crisis made many Wall Streeters rich at the cost of much national economic power. Popular culture demonized these fat cats soon after via the film Wall Street, with the famous Gordon Gecko line that “Greed is good,” and the damning Michael Lewis book Liar’s Poker.
But anyone who has read the reprinting of Liar’s Poker should understand the bitter irony of these events. Rather than offer a cautionary tale and deter morally upstanding Americans, these events painted a picture of wealth and excess that many found attractive. Soon after its printing, Michael Lewis was approached by many who asked if he could find them a job doing what he openly derided for an entire book.
The world always will have people who are greedy — or at the very least, people who will deal with a certain level of dissatisfaction in their daily work as long as they are handsomely compensated for it.
And in this job market, to think that a vast majority of Americans are turning down a highly compensated position is willfully naïve.
The nature of work in America is very complicated. But a serious problem with the moralizing over Wall Street is that for many people, work simply is a way to make money — and the more money, the better.
Many schoolteachers rack up tens of thousands of dollars in student loans only to get $40,000 a year teaching disadvantaged students. They care for the work more than the pay.
Conversely, many Americans would gladly stand naked in the rain for eight hours a day if it paid $100,000 a year and offered good benefits. They want to provide for their family and live life outside of work — not make a difference or find a greater meaning in their office life.
There might be a small number of Wall Street bankers that are sociopathic in their greed. They are simply out to win — make the deal, fleece the client, whatever it takes.
But the honest truth is that many are much simpler than that. They are simply materialistic and want to be wealthy, and the job is just a means to that end.
The Goldman employee who resigned publicly, Greg Smith, moralized in his Times column that “I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.”
Sorry, Greg, but they don’t need you to sell the job to them. Just as there always will be a group of principled Americans who want to be priests or teachers or social workers, there always will be newly minted college grads who want to drive BMWs and wear expensive suits.
And Wall Street will welcome them with open arms.
Jeff Reeves is the editor of InvestorPlace.com, and the author of “The Frugal Investor’s Guide to Finding Great Stocks.” Write him at editor@investorplace?.com, follow him on Twitter via @JeffReevesIP. As of this writing, Jeff held a position in none of the stocks named here.
