We’re going to be weighing the damage to the New York real estate market from this weekend for quite some time. The commercial real estate market is going to be a mess, especially anything below 14th Street. You can probably push back those millions of square feet in the Freedom Tower even farther on your calendar. There’s likely to be a lot of space freeing up in midtown soon.

But our friends at Curbed send word of perhaps the worst timing in real estate we’ve ever seen. Today is the official opening of Dwell95, located at 95 Wall Street. It bills itself as “an opulent mix of playfulness and seduction.” Studios start at $2,665 monthly, a one bedroom will run you $3,890. To see a second bedroom you’ll have to fork over $6,260.

They’re even throwing a party for the launch of the building. “The party kicks off at 5:30 p.m. down at Wall and Water Streets. Look for the red carpet, but by that time, the rivers of blood may have turned more than one carpet red,” Joey Arak writes.

Oops: Luxury Wall Street Rental Building Launches Today [Curbed]

[Editor’s Note: DealBreaker correspondent Everett Stuckey just returned from covering an important event on Wall Street. His report:]

When I was an analyst scurrying back and forth to my rat’s nest/cubicle the one thing that was missing from my life (besides a soul) was another tourist trap on wall street. Cause what I really need during my red bull run is crowds of slack jawed yokels moving in slow motion down the hallowed canyon of finance. So it is with great fanfare that we announce the opening of Museum of American Finance at 48 Wall Street (where else?). Soon every huckseed from Mayberry with a Scottrade account will be descending upon Wall Street for a history lesson.

Now the so called mission of The Museum of American Finance is to promote financial literacy. Yet there’s a shocking dearth of literature in the place. In fact I’m quite sure the average person can learn more about the finance industry by watching Boiler Room.

[More on the report after the jump.]

This has been a rough year for investors in Wall Street firms, many of whom work at the firms themselves. The Amex Broker-Dealer Index is down for the year, as are the shares of nearly every Wall Street investment bank and brokerage. With the exception of Citigroup, most started the year out with gains in their share prices. But when the broader markets plunged in February, the stocks of the banks and brokerages saw much steeper losses and few every recovered. Although there have been up weeks and down weeks, for long term investors, investing in these companies has been a losing strategy this year.

Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs all recovered into positive territory, while Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns struggled and, except for brief pops for Citi and Lehman, shareholders found themselves losing money all year. News of the credit crunch and subprime mortgaged related losses in late July and August, bringing the stocks in the group down even further. None of the Wall Street firms have traded higher than they did at the start of the year since July.

The sole exception to this has been the recovery of Goldman Sachs, which rose after its third-quarter earnings report revealed it had made massive gains in the areas where so many of its competitors have stumbled. It’s stock is up close to 12% year-to-date. The next be performer, with a share price decline of less than 5% for the year, is JP Morgan Chase. All of the others have declined by more than 20%. At the bottom of the barrel are Merrill and Bear, which are quickly closing in on declines as high as 30% for the year.

Wall Street is a place of legendary stress. And legendary techniques for stress relief. Jim Cramer was once famous for smashing computer key boards. John Mack used to pulverize telephones. We once had an M&A bigshot throw an entire telephone console at us. There are therapists who specialize in dealing with the stresses of life in finance.

And, of course, there are drugs. Lots of drugs. New York City is famously awash in drugs these days. In fact, just the other day a journalist asked us to put her in touch with “Wall Street types who smoke a lot of pot.” We don’t know exactly how to take the assumption that we know about these things but we couldn’t help her anyway. Most of the folks we know prefer their recreation in other forms.

According to an article in the newly businessy BusinessWeek, the use of hard drugs is greatly diminished from the days of yore. And it’s all the fault of Wharton. Or something.

While Wall Street still has its rough edges, the culture is far more straitlaced today than in past eras. “It’s more institutionalized,” says one hedge fund manager. It’s no longer acceptable to deal with your stress by hurling a computer on the floor or by indulging in drink, drugs, or alcohol. As a practical matter, the threat of a lawsuit is much higher than before. And traders are generally a more professional group than in past decades. “There weren’t as many Wharton MBAs on the scene during the 80s,” says the fund manager, who spoke on condition that he not be identified.

Today, when drugs are employed against stress, they’re more likely to be the prescription variety. Another hedge fund manager, speaking on condition of anonymity, says he has been taking antidepressants for years. While his work didn’t cause his depression, it can exacerbate it. That can lead to a modification in medication or work habits. He once even closed a particularly troublesome fund at the urging of his wife, who said it was leading to severe stress that was affecting his behavior and disrupting their marriage.

There certainly are a lot more people in finance putting on the Ritz and taking the A-Train—that is, taking Ritalin and Adderall—than there were in the days before the little pills that could were invented. But is usage of the hard stuff really down as far as the article claims? If so, then Wall Street must have been under a permanent blizzard in those days.

Gives new meaning to the idea of not trusting anyone over forty. They’re probably a drug addict.

Stressed Out on Wall Street [Business Week]

Why is Oliver Stone sitting idly by while someone else makes his sequel? Old boy doesn’t much care for the Street, in its current form. For one thing, it’s no longer a place where a little guy can earn himself some ill-gotten gains on his own two feet. “Gordon Gekko couldn’t manipulate the markets like he did back then,” Stone says. “It’s so big, so huge, that to be a minor player, you need to be a major bank.”

Also, even though he has Google Alerts set for “greed,” “CEOs and secretary hos,” “Schwarzman + crabs,” and “Wall Street + movie ideas,” nothing’s jumping out at him. Plus, stuff’s harder to “get” than it was twenty years ago. “The biggest dramatic story is Enron…But frankly I read the books, and I still can’t understand what they did. It’s very hard to do a financial movie, to make stocks and bonds sexy and interesting.”

Though one of Wall Street’s original consultants, Carl Icahn, has yet to kick it (a Snapple fact the director may not have been aware of), Stone feels “the flamboyant tycoon” has been displaced by big corporations, and thus renders a Part II of his own making impossible. This may be for the best, considering Stone’s opinion of the behaviors of these men, which he compares to peacocks swelling, and characterizes as “tasteless and disgusting.” And though in doing so we may simply be creating a crib sheet from which Stone can carry out his hate-crimes, just for fun, let’s see if we can name any flamers with some material ripe for the taking. You start.

Oliver Stone: Life after ‘Wall Street’ [Fortune]

Last night we found ourselves at some stupid fashion week party where we learned two things. First, fashion week is just fantasy football for girls. Second, there is no CDO business on Wall Street these days.

The latter became crashingly clear when we ran into a guy in the structured credit products business who we haven’t seen for years. He’s been too busy. But last night he told he hasn’t worked a night in weeks.

“It’s over. Everyone is getting fired. Entire divisions. Think vast empty wastelands,” he said.

We ordered him his favorite drink: a very dry, Hendrick’s martini on the rocks. He took the top half off it off in one swig. Then he took the bottom half off. We ordered him another.

“Right now CDO stands for Close the Door on you way Out,” he said.

We were getting a pedicure yesterday and were thus in closer proximity to a stack of horrible women’s magazines than we usually like to be. Since they’re all the same mindless trash, we randomly selected the Marie Claire with a hungry-looking Ashley Olsen cover girl off the top and set to work educating ourselves about “women who choose starter husbands,” whether or not “Botox ages you” and “Grandpa crushes.” (This is an actual quote: “Donald Sutherland is hot. And not in the ‘he’s a great actor’ way. In the ‘we’d like to strip the 72-year-old down to his sock garters and get crazy with him’ way. In fact, a poll taken at a recent mojito night revealed that every woman in our office has a grandpa crush, even the ones without major daddy issues.” Like a trip to Idiot Island, isn’t it?). Anyway, just as the pederist started massaging our legs, we came across “A Field Guide to Wall Street Women,” by Dana Vachon. Obviously, we had to continue.

Seems there are four types on women on the Street: the Social Commando, the Ivy Beleaguered, the Nuptualista, and the Big Swinging Chick.

The Social Commando, according to Monsieur Vachon, hails from Los Angeles, Houston or San Francisco, works in sales, wears DVF wrap dresses, counts the $50 mojito pitcher as her signature cocktail, and has a life expectancy on Wall Street of 2-3 years. Commando goes commando so as to mix things up around the office, disarms with “charm” (read: breasts), and sleeps with as many co-workers as time will allow. Vachon says that Commando has a Brazilian ex-boyfriend named Nacho, though all of the Commandos we’re familiar with have always had a penchant for a more Aryan breed of man. Agree to disagree. Commando doesn’t stress about getting reports in on time, because that’s not what she’s there for, she’s there to have fun, which might explain why she’s been to rehab three times. Commando is everything Penelope Trunk has always wanted you to be, except she doesn’t dress halfway between a man and a harlot, she just dresses like a harlot.

We’re not sure what this means but we’re sure it means something when Sarah Lewitinn, the famous hipster DJ and music taste-maker who is also known as Ultragrrrl, starts worrying about subprime effects on the broader financial markets.

So while trying to find articles to explain to a friend of mine exactly what’s about to happen in our economy and how a ton of people are going to end up without jobs in wallstreet and then eventually all over america resulting in a crazy recession and an impending economic turmoil, i found this article that I literally thought was from The Onion…

Her comments are echoed today by Bloomberg’s Bob Ivry. “Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke was wrong. So were U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Merrill Lynch & Co. Chief Executive Officer Stanley O’Neal” he writes. “The subprime mortgage industry’s problems were contained, they all said. It turns out that the turmoil was contagious.”

Beep Beep Beep Beep [Ultragrrrl]

Update: We’ve swapped out the picture of Ultragrrrl to preserve our “reading on the monitor at work” friendly status. The original picture was too hot for even this market. (Or, maybe, especially this market since the boss may be looking for fire someone, anyone today.) Original picture after the jump.

Delving further into its favorite class war between the Haves and the Have-Mores this weekend, The New York Times found that in Silicon Valley, people who are rich don’t feel rich compared to their very rich neighbors. And they’ll try anything—even working a whopping twelve hours a day—to move into that next tax bracket. You know, the one that will make them feel a sense of superiority and self-worth and raison d’être. Just like us (you)!

Yes, many members of this “digital elite” feel bad about themselves because they are “surrounded by people with more wealth—often a lot more.” One gilded geek, Gary Kremen, pouts, “It’s just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial guys worth $7 million wondering what’s so special about them when there are all these guys worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.” Reminds me of this story Keith likes to tell about sitting in the steam room of the 92nd Street Y with an inconsolable Daniel Seth Loeb, weeping over the fact that he made $150 million last year, sure, who cares about that when James Simons is spending that much on cigarettes annually?

But lest you think you and your West Coast brethren are too much alike, the Geek Squad makes sure to point out a notable difference: they feel bad about it. Sure, talent played a role in their good fortune, but so did “being at the right place at the right time” and many feel “sheepish, even at times guilty about their piles of cash.” See, they’re just as obsessed with money and chasing the top one-tenth of a percent (if squarely in the top one percent), or the top one-one-hundredth of one percent (if in the top one-tenth of one percent) as you, but in Silicon Valley, they’re introspective and self-doubting and have issues about their stacks of gold. Sometimes they even cry about it (when was the last time you shed some salty discharge over your bonus? And not the “I feel bad about my bonus because I got screwed out of three extra zeros so I’m going to silently weep about it in a little locked room” kind).

Which begs the question: Is it better to be a rich prick who questions his/her rich prickocity or a Dealbreaker reader? (I love you people, I do).

In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich [NYT]

Maria Bartiromo: [Five second face]

Dennis Berman: What is Wall Street?

Yes, people, Dennis Berman’s answer (and column from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal) would suggest that he’s on to your little game. Don’t even act like you don’t know what we’re talking about. You know, and we know, and Dennis knows. You get your bonus checks every twelve months, but the risks created by your work are spread over a longer time frame. By the time your fuck-ups (sometimes monumental, other times just run-of-the-mill) are revealed, it’s too late. You’ve already blown your checks on the Wii (Sun Trust) or ten Wiis (Goldman) (and if you’re Brian Hunter, tackle and bait). What’s Bear Stearns going to do, repossess your sense of self-worth derived from buying that Scores girl a newer, bigger set of implants?

You’d have to bend over backward to a. not get an enormous bonus as a banker or trader and b. sexually harass everyone within a 100-foot, 2-floor radius (merely running the firm’s hedge fund into the ground won’t do it, right, John Costas?) to even flirt with the idea of getting canned. One “top merger banker” told Berman on Friday: “I’m underwater on every single loan on my book.”

So get out there today and buy a million shares of Homebanc Corp. Georgia, which is probably about to fold and turn into junk. Then infect yourself with HIV via a Port Authority regular and pass it on to the boss’s daughter. And don’t forget to send your numbers to tips at dealbreaker dot com so that we might update our bonus bumper to reflect your handsome reward. Wall Street: long-term is just a fancy way of saying the next period of short-term.

Best Bet Against Risk Further Down the Road May Be Wall Street Gig [WSJ]

After adding 10,000 employees in June, the U.S. Securities Industry is now 848,300 worker bees strong, higher than the March 2001 level of 840,900. This is a new all-time record, and June was the biggest single month gain in number of employees since June 2000.

Despite the record number of big winners trolling the Street, DealBook reports that with the credit crunch and arguable peak of PE/M&A deal bubble, many firms have frozen hiring. Is your firm one of them? Comment or send an email to tips at dealbreaker dot com. (There are even stirrings that…gasp…bonuses might not keep pace with last year if we’ve reached the peak of the current cycle.)

Banking jobs hit record high [Financial News via DealBook]

1928 was a great year to be a WASP—the Crash hadn’t yet happened, no one questioned the sexuality of a man who adorned his body with silk twill pocket squares, and Mein Kampf was going into its ninth printing (only to be outdone several years later by Dana Vachon’s Mergers and Acquisitions, now in it’s nine-thousandth printing). To commemorate this glorious 26-times-a-fortnight, when life was droll and full of hilarious bon mots, and to celebrate the recent opening of their Wall Street branch, Hermès is offering a limited edition version of its “Cape Cod 1928” watch (“Cape Cod Wall Street”) for your consumption, exclusively at the 15 Broad store.

Complex has deemed the piece a “little Eichmann” and notes that it perfectly captures the “homogeneous banality” of “long summers on the beach,” which was the designer’s intent. We want to agree and say something about how the wearers of these things specialize in autoerotic asphyxiation but we’re actually really into the black crocodile strap, rose gold case and sunny bronze face. Jesucristo, what’s happening to us? Look away, please. Is this what it sounds like when doves cry?

Hermès Watch Reminds Us Why Wall Street and Cape Cod Sucks [Complex]

What’s more conceivable: that there’ll be another terrorist attack on par with 9/11 or that Pennsylvania could be a stand-in for Wall Street in the event of the former coming to blows? If you’re one of the officials from the Keystone State trying to “capitalize on fears of the chaos another terrorist attack might cause in New York’s financial industry,” and hocking your product, “Wall Street West,” you’re probably crossing your fingers and hoping for both.

Catherine A. Bolton, project director of the Wall Street West consortium, maintains that PA—the Poconos specifically—is ideal because , at 100 miles west of Manhattan, it is out of the “theoretical blast zone” (to beat the terrorists, you must think like the terrorists) but still close enough to link directly to the machines running the banking and trading systems.

P-town is so excited about this idea that they’ve brushed off the suggestion that New Jersey and Connecticut might be better suited for the job (not enough Amish). Governor Edward G. Rendell announced a plan yesterday to build a $24 million network of fiber optic cables to transmit data from Manhattan to the Poconos, perhaps a bit prematurely, as the New York Times notes that there’s yet to be “any sign of serious interest from firms in the real Wall Street area.” (Our emphasis, ‘cause where does the Times get off?)

Goldman Sachs has already leased Amaranth’s old office space in Greenwich, so it seems unlikely that they’ll be persuaded to take a 3 night, 4 day stay in the most luxurious resort destination in the world. And Rendell has said that “if no one decides to come, we won’t build it.” Which is such a brilliantly defeatist statement that it might actually work.

Pennsylvania Tries to Sell Itself as Backup for Wall Street During a Disaster [NYT]

One of our more charitable friends recently told us that at the Robin Hood dinner he attended last week, Michael Douglas sat next to none other than Mr. Citadel himself, Ken Griffin. Maybe it was just a completely random choice by the caterer (or maybe it didn’t happen at all—we take everything our friends in the hedge fund industry say with gigantic grains of proverbial salt (to later rub in their wounds when things go badly, because we have no souls and would shoot a puppy for a page view)), but, considering what we know about the imminence of a certain sequel, it sounds like Mike might’ve been doing some research. And that’s nice. Trying to portray his character with a hint of accuracy and whatnot.

But—Griffin? We’re not sure he’s the right model for Mr. Gekko. Too much of a “gerbil,” as high ranking official at Third Point once said, ironically quoting Gordon Gekko. He might make a good friend, but if you want a friend, get a dog. No, Griffin is not the man to inspire any Ivy League schmucks to suck his kneecaps (not even Wharton grads). But surely there’s got to be someone else up to the task.

As those of you who read Opening Bell already know, Carl Icahn lost his bid for a seat on Motorola’s board yesterday. He’d previously written a letter to shareholders describing the current board as “passive and reactive” and detailed its failure to “steer management in the right direction.” Icahn failed to win the support of large funds, but was confident that he’d sent a “wake-up call.” One wonders if it was a RAZR phone set to ring at 6am? (Our’s never actually wakes us up because: 1. It’s not loud enough. 2. We don’t use it anymore because our fourth in a row broke).

Everyone here is a little (a lot) depressed that our favorite hybrid of Walter Matthau’s grumpiness and Philip Goldstein’s particular brand of testicularity didn’t get his way, but we’re trying to suppress our feelings of hopelessness and look on the bright side: Icahn will rise again and there’s going to be a Wall Street sequel starring Michael Douglas and (fingers crossed) Ben Affleck.

In honor of these upcoming events, we’ll be playing a round of our favorite game today: Icahn or Gekko. First person to get all correct wins a copy of Jack Welch’s Winning: The Answers signed by Johnathan Fess (the down and out broker who hangs out near our lobby begging for change).

Let’s play.

1. “I have been a professional investor for almost forty years. I seek out companies that I believe are undervalued by the market — I seek them out and I invest. ”
2. “The Carnegies, the Mellons, the man who built this industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money at stake.”
3. “My significant stock ownership is many times that of the entire board.”
4. “Today management has no stake in the company.”
5. “Whether it’s 100 shares or 100 million — we invest in the hope and belief that the market will recognize that overlooked value and we’ll prosper.”
6. “In the last seven deals that I have been involved with there were 2.5m stockholders who have made a pre-tax profit of $12 billion.”
7. My activist investments over the past 2 years in companies […] have seen their stock prices add billions in market value for all shareholders.
8. “Over the past 6 months, on this board’s watch, almost $20 billion of market value, of stockholder value, of your money, has disappeared.”
9. Altogether these guys sitting up there own a total of less than 3%…
10. “I am convinced that significant stockholder representation in the boardroom, even by a single director, is absolutely necessary at this troubled company.”
11. “You own [the company], the stockholders, and you are being royally screwed over by these bureaucrats with their steak lunches, golf and hunting trips, corporate jets, and golden parachutes!”

Bonus: Identify the speaker: “You motherfuckers aren’t going to get away with this.”

Icahn loses bid for Motorola board seat [BusinessWeek]
Icahn Appears to Fall Short at Motorola [NYT]
Icahn Fails to Win Motorola Board Seat [WSJ]
Even for a Billionaire Like Icahn, Life Isn’t Always a Breeze [Deal Journal]

The revelations of George Tenet were the talk of the Sunday morning political shows this week. Despite Tenet’s defense of his own work and the work of the rest of the Central Intelligence Agency, there is still the widespread impression that our primary intelligence gathering agency is broken. The causes of the CIA’s problems are widely debated—some say it is too centralized, others that it is overstaffed by professional bureaucrats, others that it is still built around a defunct Cold War model, to name a few favorites. But Steve Sailer has recently contributed a new idea: Wall Street broke the CIA.

“CIA agents get paid like normal government bureaucrats, so the Agency gets normal government bureaucrat-quality workers,” Sailer writes. “Meanwhile, the pay at its natural competitors for the best and the brightest, such as Wall Street firms, has rocketed upwards.”

But we’re not sure it’s merely a problem of the CIA being unable to recruit the brightest college graduates. We personally know a couple of graduates from top schools—two of whom had at least a working knowledge of Arabic when they graduated—who never even got a call back interview at the agency. We can’t help but suspect that the agency isn’t even trying to recruit the “best and the brightest” these days.

The other day, Keith and I were sitting around discussing life and things of that nature when the conversation turned to the physical act of love. Not the actual physical act of love—would that he I could be so lucky!—but the topic of the physical act of love. He wondered why it was so hard to find a consenting partner, while I noted that it seemed as though the sheer number treats available at the buffet had increased exponentially (Carney was disqualified from the conversation because he’s currently practicing tantra). We thought that, perhaps, this was merely a coincidence of the unfortunate/fortunate bad/good haircuts we’d recently had. Turns out, it’s actually all your doing:

Since 2000, men, mostly between ages 25 and 44, have accounted for more than three-fourths of the population increase in Lower Manhattan. As a result, according to a special census calculation, the sex ratio there increased to 126 men per 100 women in 2005, from 101 men per 100 women in 2000. In the rest of Manhattan, and in the city over all, there were only 90 men for every 100 women.

Our old corporate finance professor used to love to torture his classes with the question: will increased efficiency and better information technology make Wall Street firms more or less wealthy. If you think that the capital markets have been getting more efficient, the answer seems obvious: hedge funds, investment banks and private equity firms are making even more money than ever. So more capital market efficiency means more money for finance right?

Not so fast. Witness a recent debate on the Marginal Revolution blog, an oddly popular website run by economist Tyler Cowen. In a rather small item on the site, Cowen favorably quoted another blogger called “Jane Galt”—the Ayn Rand allusive pen-name used by the Economist ‘s Megan McArdle on her own blog, Asymetrical Information. “To the extent that the superrich are pulling away from the rest of us…the most parsimonious explanation seems to be the massive increase in the efficiency, and size, of American capital markets,” Galt wrote.

Both American Conservative movie critic Steve Sailer and New Yorker financial writer James Surowiecki objected to Galt’s market efficiency explanation. A massive increase in the efficiency of capital markets should work against the interests of financiers, they argue.

“Shouldn’t a more efficient financial market mean that the ROI gap on the investments of the rich and non-rich should narrow, not widen?” Sailer asks. “In 1907, it helped to be as rich as J.P. Morgan to profit reliably in the financial markets because the cost of monitoring one’s investments to make sure you weren’t being ripped off was so great. Now, the friction cost of investments for small investors should be less prohibitive. So, I don’t see this as much of an explanation.”

Surowiecki agrees. “Steve’s right: a more efficient capital market is one in which there should be a smaller, not bigger, role for intermediaries. So it seems peculiar to argue that the greater efficiency of capital markets is responsible for making all these intermediaries incredibly rich,” Surowiecki writes.

But there’s no disputing the fact that “these intermediaries” are getting incredibly rich. So are the heralded efficiency gains in the capital markets illusory? In some sense, it is definitely true that financial firms are exploiting new areas of inefficiency and ignorance. Often this ignorance or inefficiency is the product of government regulations that have made the capital markets less transparent and added friction to capital movements. But is this the whole explanation?

Steve Sailer adds a clever warning against letting questions about whether finance should be theoretically profitable from getting in the way of realizing that it is a good way to make lots of money in the real world. “Back when I was taking economics courses, during Alfred Marshall’s heyday, economics professors drilled into us that financial markets were efficient, and therefore you should just put your money into a no load mutual fund because even professionals can’t beat the market,” Sailer wrote. “Being a trusting soul, I believed them and went into marketing research. My classmates at MBA school in the turning point year of 1982 paid no attention, went to Wall Street, and got rich.”

Sentences of Wisdom [Marginal Revolution]

The proposition that Wall Street and hedge fund financial know-how can save the faltering movie business is at the very least being challenged by the faltering fortunes of IMAX, which is controlled by its two largest shareholders, co-chief executives Rich Gelfond and Brad Wechsler. The two are former Drexel Burnham Lambert investment bankers who purchased Imax from its Canadian founders $85-million a dozen years ago. At the times they were partnered with a team of Wall Street investors, including Wasserstein Perella.

Now IMAX is facing an informal SEC inquiry, has been unable to file its financials as it reviews is revenue recognition practices and some observers are predicting that it is about to default on its debt covenants. Oh, and those big shot Wall Street investors have been fleeing the company. Wasserstein Perella long since got out of the business. Even Team Rich & Brad have sold down, reducing their stake to 7 and some odd percent from an initial position of 11%.

Team Brad & Rich are still talking a good game about IMAX but its starting to sound a bit, well, like the dialogue from the 300. How long until they have to say, “Tonight we dine in Hell?”

‘Red Flags’ at Imax [Edmonton Journal]

Every now and then it’s good to be reminded how work in finance is perceived by much of the world beyond Wall Street—and we’re not talking about Greenwich here, but the world outside of the metaphorical Wall Street, beyond finance. The public understanding is informed by film and television, of course, which generally portray finance as a world thick with thieves and scam-artists. And it’s informed by journalists, many of whom tend to regard Wall Streeters with a mix of contempt and envy that largely masks their own ignorance.

Take, for instance, the new blog at the New York Times. We haven’t actually, you know, read the blog at the Times because it’s hidden behind that Times Select wall. But we’re told the Times has college seniors blogging about the impending arrival of the real world. And, of course, finance has entered the picture…dressed in black, with guns smoking and the young women fleeing.

Here’s how the blog at the Economist describes the NYT blog item.

The young woman who wrote today’s post says the best and the brightest all aspire to be investment bankers (she also thinks they read economics because of this desire). She does not regard this as a salutory development. A generation ago, the most talented graduates aspired to be doctors or lawyers. Medicine used to be the profession associated with a high income and social prestige, many of the brightest and most ambitious became doctors for this reason. Now we associate a career in medicine with malpractice suits and being the employee of an insurance company. For considerably less in student loans, and a significantly larger pay-check, a finance career holds promise of wealth and status. And so the brain drain empties directly into the abyss of the investment world.

You got that? Hedge funds, investment banks, private equity shops, brokerages. It’s all the abyss.

The souless generation? [Free Exchange]