Watch CBS News Videos Online
Speaking of Lewis, Janet Tavakoli had a few things to say about him and The Big Short this morning– the book gets the crisis all wrong, and Mike is a “girlie man” and a “eunuch.”
Michael Lewis: “No Intelligent Person Who’s Sitting On Wall Street Can Think Of Themselves As Anything But Overpaid”
By Bess Levin — Advertisement —
Comments (58)
Leave a comment
You can log in with your account or comment as a guest below.

Don’t be bitter because Tabitha won’t do anal Michael. It’s unbecoming.
No one on wall street think’s they are overpaid. Ipso Facto, no one on Wall Street is intelligent.
working for a smaller b/d, non-bulge bracket, results in being underpaid…….
Anal_yst, any thoughts on Mikey being sour about lack of buttsecks?
@4 get a new shtick. this one never has and will never be funny.
this tavakoli chick’s got panache.
This from the author of such books as, “The New Thing”, which was followed by “The NEW New Thing”. Is this real life?
@4 – Go kill yourself.
@ 4- If you’re going to post, make sure its funny.
Not 5
Where’s Tax-Cluzo-Chick? Now that it has been outed is it licking its wounds in a darkened room somewhere?
#4: You should really go back to Houston.
@ 10- whoa, what was the story with taxchick/cluzo? outed? seriously, what is the story.
@4 > You are not an intelligent person.
-UVA grad
I love this site- all the WS ballers defending my firm. Thank you DB and Bess!!
Anyone in this industry who believes that it’s based on anything more than borrowing at x% and lending at (x+3)% is a raving idiot. I know the “wealth creation” and “allocating capital” lines are fun and all but ultimiately 90% is just mind-numbing clerical work.
Fortunately the numbers involved are so vast that paying ourselves a shitload ammounts to little more than a rounding error, so, yeah. Paper money FTW.
Screw you, Brian Willaims!
Bess, how big of a dropoff in hits/day since the new site?
@15 Infidel. You are not welcome here. We *deserve* our pay dammit!
his wife is hideous
Its no surprise that people who write books, do so for a reason.
His speaking skills were a disaster in 2nd half of interview on compensation. He was rambling about ratings, CDS, etc.
A simple ouline of pay (AG Cuomos tables), guarantees, and near-zero profits of IB franchises (v. trading) would have been fine
ie,
-2nd yr associates making $300+
-VPs making more than 75-25 percentile of Fortune 1000 CFOs
-5000 MDs making over $1 Million
-1000 MDs making over $5 million
-100 MDs making over $10 Million
-50 MDs making $50-100 Million
-3x5s for all
-pay of Prince, O’Neil, Schwartz, Cruz, Thain, etc.
His MTV wife had to be the plainest jane ever on that network!
Anyone else see a hint of Moynihan in Lewis?
I propose that M.Lewis is related to K.Lewis (by name) and since M.Lewis is cleary related to Moynihan (by face), ML pleaded with KL to “make room” for BM up top…Ipso Facto ML is the brains (and the balls) behind Bank of America.
@6 Yep, he sure pwned because of that Bloomberg piece.
Anal_yst, thoughts?
@ 23- Do you really care or is it you couldn’t find anything intelligent to post and needed to ask someone for their thoughts?
@15, what is “this industry”? Being a college student? Or are you pretending that you work in finance for the purpose of your post?
@15m, Love your name.. reference to MacKay’s book. One of the best books ever written and as alluded to by Lewis in the article.. it’s group think that allowed the whole CDO mess to become commonly believed when in retrospect the group think overpowered rational skepticism… much like AGW, but now I digress
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds
@20..just because you are not a good public speaker, does not make your points incorrect.
not defending lewis, just sayin’
@20..just because you are not a good public speaker, does not make your points incorrect.
not defending lewis, just sayin’
Lewis is selling “massive delusion” in an attempt to make his book seem somehow more “complex” when the simple answer is greed.
@15=Chase employeed who was rejected by JPM but still thinks they are in the same LOB.
@26- “it’s group think that allowed the whole CDO mess to become commonly believed”….Wait, twat? Cum again? I cunt understand you.
Lewis has got a point. No one enters IB, trading, etc. because they find it interesting or challenging. They go into finance because of the money. And even in relatively down years, WS still gets paid. So at some point, it’s expected, not thanked.
@7
Is anything real in this world anymore?
-the hammer
@30. Your correct. Very convoluted statement. Let me try again.
Group think describes an environment where traders, rating’s agencies, investors, regulators, market risk managers and financial press are all happy with the assumptions and results of the gaussian copulas and the the default time correlations which suggest that large pools of mortgages from similar economic and regional sources will be sufficiently diversified to allow senior tranches to be default immune… or similar.. in retrospect, it’s comical.
To be fair, most everyone with a high level of understanding of how CDOs worked and the amount of Super Senior on the bank’s balance sheets knew that it was a ticking time bomb. Except for those paid to produce and sell more CDOs. Michael Lewis is right that the way you compensate a person or a group defines largely what they think/believe and how they behave.
I am friends with a senior manger who was responsible for running structured credit at a very large bank. He did not want to grow the CDO business as fast as senior management wanted to grow it. He told me privately that the CDO business was a “Nuclear Bomb” waiting to explode.
In 2005 they replaced him with someone (a ‘star’) from another flashy bank and that new guy did a splendid job of ramping up CDO issuance … so much so that the bank got loaded up with many many billions of dollars of Super Senior CDO tranches which went Kaboom in 2008.
There are many similar stories….
@33 Don’t even bother. Anyone who criticizes any aspect of “Wall St” has never worked there or is a reject.
~TheOneEyedDoctor
@33/34 Don’t even bother. Anyone who criticizes any aspect of “Wall St” has never worked there or is a reject.
~TheOneEyedDoctor
@35/36
You nailed it. Am a reject.
But I’ve worked in rates and credit trading vol/correlation for many years.
@33/34/all other Blue people: You can’t have it both ways. Push banks to embrace sub-prime lending “so e, then attack attempts to thwart that risk? CDO’s provide liquidity…However, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing
@31 I was motivated by the culture depicted in the movie Wall Street and the books Liar’s Poker.
I know I am overpaid, does it make me an intelligent banker? Anyways, back to my desk…
Anal_yst,
Any thoughts on the “any thoughts” line of posts? And on everyone being overpaid on WS?
@35, Are you the real ‘one eyed doctor’, if so kudos and praise.
If you’re an imitator, at least your sock poppet identity is topical and amusing.
WS is way over paid but thats supposed to be the way it goes. My question is how many of you WS assholes voted for and donated to Obama and now have to reap what you voted for.
Schumer and many other Dems think doctors are over paid and want to regulate what they make too. They are using the medical bill to dictate compensation across many sectors.
Do the WS ballers have the same feeling about regulating other industries as they do their own? You guys still throwing $10,000 a plate dinners for these guys who want to take your money and give it to the unions.
Look… ask most people if they’d rather be dumb and rich.. or intelligent and poor.
whoever picks the latter is real dumb one.
I love Janet!
The Dems have been regulating other industry comp for years. I love the fact that WS comp is suddenly and finally the target of the very people who’s campaigns they have financed. I never heard one complaint from WS until now. The hypocrisy is well…pleasing to say the least.
WELCOME TO THE PARTY!!!
Vote for your freedom and your wallet in November.
Freedom isn’t free…it costs a hefty %%%in fee, and if you don’t put in your buck 05 who wiiiiiiiil?
LEWIS: Howie Hubler.
But no where else on Wall Street was there a single trader, I don’t think, making a directional bet on the subprime mortgage market who lost as much as Howie Hubler did at Morgan Stanley. He lost $9.4 billion.
I don’t think anybody’s ever done that on Wall Street. And this guy had done it. And he was basically anonymous. It was amazing to me. This is another example of the way things that used to be scandalous became innocent. When I was at Salomon Brothers, we had a Howie, Howie Rubin, who went from Salomon Brothers to Merrill Lynch and lost a few hundred million dollars and ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and became radioactive for awhile. And it was only $300 million.
Howie Hubler loses almost $10 billion
@48, I was a college summer intern on the trading desk at ML and Howie screwed me to the wall on a mortgage bond trade that I was executing for private client. It was my first ‘error’ but the FC adjusted the trade price to the client and I was able to skate…. He is a scum bag. He was F*&King me for sport.
Unless I’m wrong, he got a job at Bear Sterns almost immediately after hiding the discovery of the “IO” tranche trades that he’d been hiding were discovered.
I think Brian Bearfoot took more of a career hit than Howie.
@49 Wrong Howie dumbass. You are thinking of Howie Rubin.
@49 Wrong Howie dumbass. You are thinking of Howie Rubin.
@49 Wrong Howie dumbass. You are thinking of Howie Rubin.
50/51/52
Obviously. I worked with him. I know his name.
I was following up on @48 which mentions Rubin
http://www.howiehubler.net/owner.htm
Where he came from & where he may have gone. He is on the staff page and may be reached at info@howiehubler.net
New Jersey RE. The new killing it.
@30…we’ll finger it out later
@30…we’ll finger it out later
Just read Big Short…Michael Lewis does it again….its the best. And FOCK YOU HOWIE HUBLER….I wish we can list all these assholes who left wall street after the disaster with millions….just make a website with their names, addresses, phone numbers…make it a hell for them.
Sure, please email the details! Thanks!