Wall St middle-aged bankers stuck in squeezed middle
It is Wall Street’s “squeezed middle”: a large cohort of bankers in their thirties and forties are fretting that promotions to their banks’ top tier are becoming harder to secure.
Many of them accept that being stuck on a few hundred thousand dollars a year hardly qualifies as hardship for most of the world’s workers, but that does not stop the yearning for a diminishing number of managing director jobs, which offer significantly more pay and prestige.
“For a variety of reasons, achieving the MD title has become much more difficult,” said Mike Karp, chief executive of Options Group, a recruitment firm, pointing first to the sharp declines in total industry employment since 2010.
Goldman Sachs is in the final stage of its biennial selection of new “partner managing directors”, the most coveted class, where base salary is about $900,000 and bonuses can be a multiple of that.
The top rung of the bank ladder has become harder to reach, and for those who get there, the perks and pay are less than they used to be.
Though a headache for those denied one of the multimillion dollar jobs, their decline may be a positive sign for regulators trying to contain the debt-fuelled risk taking that enabled the previous bonuses and for shareholders demanding a bigger slice of earnings.
Source: ft
