My previous piece on the sad life of investment bankers unable to buy jets attracted a comment from economist Brad DeLong:
It’s now official: Paul Kedrosky has left the normal world behind completely. There is a value of “that well” for which the statement “investment banking (and trading, etc.) pays well, it doesn’t pay that well” is true. But such a value is not assigned to “that well” by anybody with any contact in the normal world.
While I’ll never pretend to have a perfect attendance record on terra firma, here is what Brad missed: italics. I said, “…while investment banking (and trading, etc.) pays well, it doesn’t pay that well.” Read in the requisite rising tone — banking doesn’t pay tha-AT well — my comment was intended to be ironic.
No fault of Brad’s, however. We should stipulate that people start putting ironic comments in blue or something. I miss ‘em all the time.
Related posts:
That is why so many i-bankers now fancy themselves as private equity sorts, hedge fund managers, and pretty much anything else where they can get away from being fee-for-service slaves and generate some real wealth.
How do you explain the ‘some real wealth’ comment?
A Revolution of Rising Expectations
It’s now official: Paul Kedrosky has left the normal world behind completely. There is a value of “that well” for which the statement “investment banking (and trading, etc.) pays well, it doesn’t pay that well” is true. But such a value is not assigned…
Explain? I didn’t know I had to. It was supposed to be amusing, the idea of parsing various obscene levels of wealth.
Ah. It’s actually a really funny comment now that I know you’re joking.