Best news in a while...

Reform

For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. “I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.” “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”

To be clear, the $75,000 is the bonus, not the salary. Also, the national real median household income in the United States is $49,445, or 66% of this banker's estimated bonus. It does make one long for a non-existent past when our pampered elites were not so sophomoric, not such colossal whiners, so eager to shift the blame onto their girlfriend's eating habits and taxes, so eager to attribute credit for their inflated incomes to their intelligence and drive.

Maybe this is why Downton Abbey is having such success.