“You’re not only wrong. You’re wrong at the top of your voice.”

-       John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy), ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’.

The seemingly vampiric permanence of the investment banking survivors versus their peers in hedge funds, property or private equity suggests, as one correspondent posits, that “the end result is going to be very messy”. While Lehman was Wall Street’s singular blood offering, what will it take to put a stake through the heart of rejuvenated risk-mongering ? The Financial Times last week carried a refreshingly outspoken interview with Paul Purcell (brother of Morgan Stanley’s Philip) who laid the blame for the financial crisis on “the greed of fixed-income people”: “Go back and look at the history of Wall Street – Drexel Burnham, Salomon Brothers, Kidder Peabody, Bear Stearns, Long-Term Capital Management, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch – the fixed-income guys blow up every firm.” On first sight this seems perverse, given the tendency of bonds as a whole to be largely mundane investments, seemingly offering little by way of either return or risk. But once you add leverage to the mix, in order to generate those super-sized profits (and bonuses), all becomes clear. Mr. Purcell continues to take Wall Street to task: “We [investment bank RW Baird] didn’t do the bad things that the rest of Wall Street did. The difference is we actually take care of our clients. We want to make money for people. The big firms created proprietary product they put through their own distribution systems to make them more money, whether the clients needed the product or not. Our business is to sell people the right product at the right time for the right price.” Which sounds fair enough; the problem being, says Mr. Purcell, in the “75% of the people in our business [who] are not honest.”

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