Last Updated: September 18, 2008 11:27am ET

The Incredible Shrinking Industry

By Jonathan D. Miller
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As heads spin and iconic Wall Street companies disappear, the financial industry diminishes before our very eyes. How many jobs will be lost in these various shotgun marriages, bankruptcies, and shut downs? The toll will be huge--many tens of thousands, including a high percentage of big ticket bankers and traders. Poof. And they won't be coming back anytime soon.

Once re-energized regulators get through, all those sleight of hand transactions, which created a Wall Street fee bonanza over the past decade, will either be eliminated or become prohibitively expensive to undertake. So long credit default swaps and CDOs. When companies finally recapitalize, lending activities will be constrained by conservative underwriting requiring strong credit from borrowers, and without free flowing leverage, transaction activity will be muted for quite a while.  What's left of the  industry won't need all those bodies for trading, flipping, tranching, slicing and dicing. Surviving bankers may actually focus again on financing new industries, good companies,and sound real estate projects which actually create long-term value in the economy instead of stratospheric year-end bonuses.

For real estate it will be back to basics--more long-term buying and holding and a focus on asset management and leasing. Everyone will be making less--fewer transactions translate into less fees.

It was only six months ago that everybody coming out of business school wanted to be an investment banker or hedge fund manager. And it was only eight years ago everyone wanted to run a dot.com. This latest episode may be a wake-up call to concentrate our considerable collective national brainpower back to engineering, science and medicine.

More hedge funds we don't need.

(To search across all ALM blogs, go to www.Lexis.com.)

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