Partying on the deck of the Titanic

I was at the fancy Breakers hotel last night. There were two big holiday events. One was a Morgan Stanley dinner of a few hundred people. Another one was a women’s group.

I’m not sure if the Morgan Stanley thing was just a local wealth management gathering for South Florida or if it was a national meeting, but none of them looked impressive. They were all people in their 50s or older, as opposed to the New York Wall Street crowd, which is all under the age of 40.

It reminded me of how much I disliked working at Wall Street. It’s a very unattractive group (even if they are younger).

It made me wonder how completely unimpressive people like that have jobs when there’s so much going wrong in the economy and layoffs. They must be playing the game correctly.

If I were the CEO of Morgan Stanley, I would fire all of them.

I guess my point is that real financial jobs are not what the outside world thinks they are. They are not ultra wealthy sexy people. Even at the best hedge funds, most of them are making barely enough to pay their mortgages or rent. I was in the top of the food chain with my jobs and I still was barely getting by with my $100,000 base salary. I lived in a crappy apartment in Murray Hill or Battery Park.

The other big observation from this, which I’m going to be talking about next week in a podcast, is how this entire industry of expensive dining and golf is being driven by the corporate credit card. None of those schmucks at this Morgan Stanley dinner could afford to routinely go across the hallway to the private restaurant if they wanted to. Few people are paying for these $100 seafood platters like I got unless it is on the Corporate expense tab. All that is going to come to an end in a few months.