For some, hopefully, this story may provide a fresh win dow into the world of investment banking. Without being one, no one can really know what a banker does. Before we started, all we knew was that bankers, traders, and egregious salaries were always mentioned in the same breath. Understanding what a trader does is a little more intuitive than understanding what a banker does, because everybody's traded for something in their life. It may have been something as simple as a rookie Ron Guidry baseball card for an All-Star Reggie Jackson card, but the concept of an exchange for relative value is as old as humankind itself.
Investment banking has no such intuitive counterpart in real life.
It took our mothers six months to realize that we weren't stockbrokers, working the phones to sell crappy public offerings to unsuspecting investors. It took us another six months after that to real ize that we were, in fact, selling crappy public offerings to investors. The only difference was that we weren't selling them over the phone, we were doing it in person, and the investors weren't unsuspecting individual investors, they were the Fidelitys, the Putnams, and the T. Rowe Prices of the world. The wire services released the story first. It was quickly picked up and parroted by almost every major media outlet in the country as a classic example of Wall Street excess.