Oh, Cry Me a River

Oh, you did not just say that.  Excerpts:

Risk is what drew George and the colleagues he respects to Wall Street, he says. At his peak, he could bring in millions of dollars in a single month. Trading was intense: During one credit-default swap deal he smashed a phone against his desk, sending part of it three rows away—“one of the records for the best break,” he says. Sam Polk, 32, who traded credit derivatives at Bank of America (BAC) and King Street Capital Management, a New York hedge fund, described the lure of Wall Street before he left in 2010: “You could be a twentysomething trader three years out of school, able to go to any restaurant or club or ballgame on any night that you wanted, and it was totally paid for,” he says. “It was a tremendous feeling of power...”

Increased regulation, he says, “has taken a lot of the fun out of the game...”


McWelling Todman, a professor of clinical psychology at the New School in New York, says restrictions frustrate risk takers. “If you’re essentially telling them to be like everybody else and to follow rules, you’re amputating a large part of who they are, who they consider themselves to be,” Todman says. The response to curtailed risk is similar to chemical withdrawal, according to Leo Goldberger, an emeritus psychology professor at New York University, who studied stress. “It would be like a drug addict not getting what he has to have,” he says.

...For George, the Muay Thai fighter, fulfillment is less about the money than the excitement. “People are sad,” he says of his colleagues on Wall Street. “They don’t have any risk. There is nothing to be stressed about.” George says he likes working at Jefferies, which is less regulated than the biggest banks. Even so, he says, Wall Street is “not the same industry that drew me in.” Two years ago he opened C3 Athletics, a martial arts training center in Stamford, Conn. And he has already scheduled another fight. “I’m excited about that,” he says...

Look, guys--a lot of the money you're working with comes from retirement funds and average people's investment portfolios. There was never supposed to be such huge amounts of ridiculous risk in the first place for those. Less risk makes the job seem pointless? Really? What the heck were you doing in banking in the first place? You guys get paid so much so that we get our money back with interest, not to gamble at Vegas.