Recent history of investment banks

by the Epicurean Dealmaker, aka "TED":

So when fixed commissions were eliminated [in 1975], the huge capital markets business of a typical investment bank could no longer support itself financially. Banks needed to find another use for all that investment in infrastructure. Pace the supposed genius of the innovators at Salomon Brothers, it was only a small and intellectually undemanding step from using relatively small amounts of in-house capital to support underwriting and market-making activities to using a much larger amount of money trading for their own account, on a proprietary basis. Because they were "in the flow" and saw the securities markets from the privileged position of market makers, "prop desks" at investment banks started making money hand over fist. In other words, they started acting like hedge funds.

Add in the ballooning federal deficits of the Reagan years (and the resulting huge trading volumes in fixed income securities and related derivatives), the explosion in equity trading which accompanied the internet boom, and Alan Greenspan plying the financial markets with liquidity like a whorehouse madam plies shore-leave sailors with booze, and you can readily see that capital markets operations became the dominant business line of all major investment banks over the past couple of decades.

Of course, there was trouble in paradise. Trying to incorporate a volatile principal-oriented business like proprietary trading into an organization that was otherwise focused on agency business like M&A advisory, capital raising, and underwriting caused all sorts of problems. When the prop traders made a bundle betting for the firm, they brought home annual bonuses that struck even the highly overcompensated bankers in M&A and corporate finance as nothing short of obscene, and when their trades blew up in their faces everybody else at the firm suffered big cuts in compensation regardless of how good their individual years had been. Bankers off the trading floor began speaking bitterly about the "trader's option," while the unlucky traders got fired and sauntered across the Street to another prop desk at another bank.

If I had to venture a guess—you didn't think I wouldn't, did you?—I would say that we will see a repopulation of the middle of the industry over time. At the top end, in size and revenues—but not necessarily prestige or reputation—we will continue to see hedge fund-i-bank hybrids flinging their balance sheets about and trying to be all things to all people. Most of these will be combinations of commercial banks and investment banks, but there may still be a place for a Goldman Sachs or a Morgan Stanley if they remain religiously devoted to careful risk control.

Such firms should be successful, at least among the clients who truly need the services they deliver. The current market environment, and the current systemwide flight from risk, may mean that these banks will have to settle for lower returns on equity, and their bankers will have to settle for lower compensation, than they have been used to in the recent past. If this is the case, you will see higher-profile investment bankers—"rainmakers" who can write their own ticket (or persuade others they can)—bleed out of such leviathans into smaller, more prestigious advisory boutiques, where they can eat what they kill.

TED starts off talking about reptiles, amphibians, and mammals. It just struck me that law firms could be the fish in this metaphor. The i-banking boutiques may be more attorney than banker in the next phase.