I hung out with my 5-year old cousin last weekend, a precocious little chap. I told him I may have a LOT more time to do finger paints with him in the near future, should my bank keep losing money (redundancies look to be a matter of when, not if.) “Don’t become a rich banker like me, Georgie,” I told him, “there’s nothing ‘rich’ about us anymore.” Unless you’re a 50-yr old executive being paid from bailout funds, that is.

With big eyes and boyish innocence, he asked the most poignant question, “Where did all your money go?”

Preoccupied by bailout news and bankrupted clients, I hadn’t thought about our crisis in such deceptively simple terms before. But the only answer I fathomed was, “I guess, Georgie, it was never really there to begin with.”

The truth is we’ve spent the past couple decades slicing, securitizing, and super-sizing assets that were marked-to-market - except for that this “market” was, frankly, bogus. It relied heavily on the false premise that house values would always go up, and that we could always get credit.

And for years, this bubble sustained astronomical City salaries, which stood in stark contrast to the value of things on the ground.

But without pausing a moment for reflection, many of my laid-off friends are now firing off CV’s and filling out business school applications, all in an effort to be “ready” for the next wave. They simply want life to go on as before. Nevermind that everyone “trying to catch the wave” led us into this very mess to begin with.
Bankers who are acting as if it’s the apocalypse must have been completely tuned out in recent years. In any case, they are failing to appropriately grasp the new City zeitgeist.

Things look so bad in banking that if you think the difference in pay isn’t as big as it used to be between doing what you are viscerally interested in versus one that’s just about the bling, it puts a whole different spin on it. Our market tsunami will free up the City’s best talent to do other things that will change the metronome of cities like London permanently.

I asked Georgie what he wanted to be when he grows up, and he said, “I want to play the drums.” When I asked him how he would support himself, he said he would also paint. When I asked him how he would support THAT, he said he would also write. Clearly, he didn't understand the kinds of things that people pay for.

But hopefully by the time Georgie’s old enough to get a City job, society’s reward system will have flipped, and his dreams won’t seem so unprofitable after all.