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Featured Story
February 23, 2009
Riding It Out
Wharton Alumni and Students Evaluate Prospects for Careers in Finance in a Global Downturn
In the past two years, more than 300,000 U.S. finance jobs have been lost. Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch have been merged into larger players. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are commercial banks. Lehman Bros., after 158 years in business, is gone. The U.S. government has become a major force in the financial system, with billions pledged in bailouts.
Wall Street is forever changed after decades of relative stability and bubbly periods of boom that lured the top students in class after class at Wharton into careers as bankers, traders, and financial engineers. International finance centers, from London to Hong Kong, are also suffering as finance jobs slip away.
"Markets have ups and downs, and the economy has ups and downs, but this is an exceptional down," says Allen Levinson, W’77, WG’78, founder of the hedge fund manager Credit Risk Advisors, LP and a member of the Wharton Alumni Club of New York’s Board of Directors.
"The finance industry is going to suffer in a fashion that is pretty significant and it will take a while to come back," he continues. "And no question, when it comes back it is going to look different than it did previously."
Dean Thomas Robertson has a similar view. "In the short run there will be contraction, but the need for financing and financial expertise is not going to go away," he says. "The need for capital to run businesses will not disappear. Every problem is an opportunity for someone to make money."
