Part of the charm of Wall Street, and what scares most reasonable people away, is that it is as close to a meritocracy as exists on this earth. It’s dog eat dog. It’s sink or swim. You do a trade and it makes money, then you’re a hero (for a moment anyway) and deserve a bonus. You bring in a deal, you get paid. You lasso more clients’ assets under your firm’s roof, you’re a hitter. I once discovered some good news on the stocks I followed before the rest of the Street, and mentioned it to the sales force at a morning meeting and moved markets in New York, Tokyo and London. I had the head of global equities pat my head on the elevator ride up the next morning. Pat my head! I was told he never does that.

The flip side, of course, is what makes Wall Street so dangerous. You lose money for the firm and you’re a heel. Do it again and you don’t get paid that year. Do it a third time and you’re out of a job. Just like that. Gone. I’ve seen it happen to friends and acquaintances at just about every firm up and down Wall Street. There is no tenure on Wall Street, no job security, no long-term guarantees. Ten- and 20-year careers end in a flash. Happens all the time, and everybody who works in the business knows this.

That’s one reason why everyone is paid so well. Think of it as combat pay. But the other reason compensation is many, many multiples of the average wage in this country is that trading stocks, doing IPOs, merging companies, managing money is a very lucrative business. Not everyone can do it. It looks easy, football-field-sized trading rooms jammed with adrenalin-rush maniacs sitting in front of huge LCD screens. It might as well be a call center in Mumbai. But it’s hard. Really nasty hard. Wall Street hires in that 99 percentile zone. And then they make your life miserable hoping you’ll quit before they break you. Or hoping they break you before you lose money for the firm. It’s not WalMart or General Motors or even Pfizer or Intel. It’s trial by fire.

You would think that would make the entire workforce afraid to do anything for fear of being tossed…

 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124762005061042587.html

I remember once buying the stock of a small company and I couldn’t believe my luck. Every time my fund bought more shares the stock would go up. So we bought even more and the stock kept climbing. When we finally built our full position and stopped buying the stock started dropping, ending up at a price below where we started buying it. We were the market.

Just about every policy move to right the U.S. economy after the subprime sinking of the banking system has been a bust. We saved Bear Stearns. We let Lehman Brothers go. We forced Merrill Lynch, Wachovia and Washington Mutual into the hands of others. We took control of Fannie and Freddie and AIG and even own a few car companies, pumping them with high-test transfusions. None of this really helped.

We have a zero interest-rate policy. We guaranteed bank debt. We set up the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to buy toxic mortgage assets off bank balance sheets. But when banks refused to sell at fire sale prices, we just gave them the money instead. Dumb move. So we set up the Public-Private Investment Program to get private investors to buy these same toxic assets with government leverage, and still there are few sellers. Meanwhile, the $1 trillion federal deficit is crowding out private investment and the porky $787 billion stimulus hasn’t translated into growth.

At the end of the day, only one thing has worked — flooding the market with dollars. By buying U.S. Treasuries and mortgages to increase the monetary base by $1 trillion, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke didn’t put money directly into the stock market but he didn’t have to. With nowhere else to go, except maybe commodities, inflows into the stock market have been on a tear. Stock and bond funds saw net inflows of close to $150 billion since January. The dollars he cranked out didn’t go into the hard economy, but instead into tradable assets. In other words, Ben Bernanke has been the market.

The good news is that Mr. Bernanke got the major banks, except for Citigroup, recapitalized and with public money. June retail sales rose 0.6%. Housing starts jumped 17% month to month in May and…

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has bounced an astounding 30% from its March 9 low of 6547. Is this the dawn of a new era? Are we off to the races again? 

Only a fool predicts the stock market, so here I go.

I’m not so sure. Only a fool predicts the stock market, so here I go. This sure smells to me like a sucker’s rally. That’s because there aren’t sustainable, fundamental reasons for the market’s continued rise. Here are three explanations for the short-term upswing:

1) Armageddon is off the table. It has been clear for some time that the funds available from the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) were not going to be enough to shore up bank balance sheets laced with toxic assets.

On Feb. 10, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rolled out another, much hyped bank rescue plan. It was judged incomplete — and the market sold off 382 points in disgust.

Citigroup stock flirted with $1 on March 9. Nationalizations seemed inevitable as bears had their day.

Still, the Treasury bought time by announcing on the same day as Mr. Geithner’s underwhelming rescue plan that it would conduct "stress tests" of 19 large U.S. banks. It also implied, over time, that no bank would fail the test (which was more a negotiation than an audit). And when White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel clearly stated on April 19 that nationalization was "not the goal" of the administration, it became safe to own financial stocks again.

It doesn’t matter if financial institution losses are $2 trillion or the pessimists’ $3.6 trillion. "No more failures" is policy. While the U.S. government may end up owning maybe a third of the equity of Citi and Bank of America and a few others, none will be nationalized. And even though future bank profits will be held back by constant write downs of "legacy" assets (we don’t call them toxic anymore), the bears have backed off and the market rallied — Citi is now $4.

2) Zero yields. The Federal Reserve, by driving short-term rates to almost zero, has messed up asset allocation formulas. Money always seeks its highest risk-adjusted return. Thus in normal markets if bond yields rise they become more attractive…