So finally, Alan “Ace” Greenberg has called “the end” of Wall Street as we knew it. The octagenarian former Bear Stearns chief executive who is approaching his 61st year on Wall Street has told Bloomberg that the investment-banking model he helped pioneer is “gone”.
“There’s no more Wall Street,” Greenberg told Bloomberg’s “Money & Politics” television programme. “That model just doesn’t work because it’s at the mercy of rumours.”
And rumours “can start and turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy,” Greenberg said, adding that he has “never seen anything close” to the current economic decline and turmoil in the financial markets — and that’s really saying something for an 81-year-old.
It sounds rather like Greenberg, too, may have read Michael Lewis’ seminal article for Portfolio “The End”. If you haven’t yet, read how Lewis returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong on Wall Street.
Or he may have read CNNMoney’s “The end of Wall Street”, on how a business model built on ramping up risk and leverage simply doesn’t work.
Or the Wall Street Journal’s September article called – err, “The end of Wall Street”, on how the pure-play investment bank itself was a “regulatory artifact”.
Then again, at Greenberg’s age, five years may seem a short time, and he may have read this prescient little piece of commentary called – err, “The End of Wall Street?”, published way back in November 2003 – yes, 2003, on Researchstock.com by Richard Wayman, a CFA. It begins:Wall Street, as we knew it is dead. The system that allowed the US economy to be a dynamic innovator has been fundamentally broken and the implications of these structural changes have yet to be fully felt. While the US economy has weathered many serious challenges before and will continue to exist, the key question is whether it will retain the capacity to provide capital to innovators.__________