What Hillary Clinton Gets (and Bernie Sanders Doesn’t) About Wall Street
And if there is a central story of Wall Street since the nineteen-nineties, it has been the stagnation of the sell side and the rise of the buy side, because of technology, regulation, and new profit opportunities.
.. In the past decade, electronic-trading platforms that connect buy-side investors to one another have cleared out floors of traders and other sell-side intermediaries, leading to developments like Morgan Stanley’s recent decision to lay off twenty-five per cent of its bond and currency traders. Meanwhile, many of the Dodd-Frank regulations introduced, after the 2008 financial crisis, forced sell-side banks to shift in countless and surprising ways to less-risky business lines, becoming less profitable as a result.
.. When it comes to pay, yes, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs makes mad money, but in 2014, according to Forbes, the top twenty-five hedge-fund managers—individuals, not firms—made twelve and a half billion dollars from profits they earned as asset managers and appreciation in their own managed investments. That is only two hundred million dollars less than the total compensation expenses forevery employee at Goldman Sachs.