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Success Of Pirates At Sea Offers Alternative To Investment Banking Jobs

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By MARK GILBERT

Bloomberg News

Published: November 29, 2008

It's the conversation every parent dreads. Mom, Dad, you know how I've always been a little different from the other kids? Well, I think its time you knew the truth. I think I'm, um, an investment banker!

So how do you stop the fruit of your loins, the inheritors of your estate, the bearers of your lineage, from making a huge lifestyle mistake and bringing shame on your name? Here are some alternative professions you should consider steering your offspring toward in order to avoid the stigma of having a finance professional in the family.

Theres no parrot, eye patch, tricorn hat or peg leg these days. You do, however, get your own AK-47 rifle. In recent weeks, piracy has become the highest-profile profession in the world. Shiver me timbers!

To be sure, hijacking supertankers was a lot more lucrative when oil was trading at more than $140 a barrel, compared with its current value of about $50. The past years' 90 percent decline in the Baltic Dry Index, a measure of the cost of shipping commodities around the world, suggests ship owners aren't earning enough money to buy the kind of armed protection that might make a pirate's life more difficult.

No wonder hijackings by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden region have tripled, with more than 581 crew members taken hostage this year through September, up from 172 in all of 2007, according to the International Maritime Bureau.

In truth, growing up to be Captain Jack Sparrow isn't that different from a career in finance, based on the lyrics of a song made famous by The Walt Disney Co.: "We extort, we pilfer, we filch and sack, drink up, me hearties, yo ho! Maraud and embezzle and even hijack, drink up, me hearties, yo ho!"

Nobody goes into investment banking because they love photocopying, enjoy working through the night fueled only by pizza and diet soda, or get a kick out of cold-calling investors begging them to buy the latest whiz-bang derivative.

There have been only two reasons to endure finance's abusive working conditions: money and a Darwinist hope that you might one day rise to become chief executive officer.

The first reason has disappeared in a puff of write-downs and bailouts. Bonus is a dirty word. The days when the ability to say "This AAA-rated collateralized debt obligation is priced at par" with a straight face was enough to earn you a Bentley-buying payout are over for the foreseeable future.

These days, inching your way up the greasy pole of management isn't the best way to achieve seniority at an investment bank. Instead, a career in the civil service beckons as the fast-track to becoming the person who calls the shots. Heck, half of the world's finance professionals are working for the government, while the other half can barely write a trading ticket without permission.

Quantitative easing is the new black, with the U.S. Treasury throwing cash at the recession as fast as the printing presses can engrave bills. The likely next action from the policymaking playbook, after the Federal Reserve interest rate drops to zero, is direct purchases of U.S. government debt.

The development of economic systems that concentrate on the common good depends on a determinate ethical system. The decline of such discipline can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse. We need a maximum of specialized economic understanding, but also a maximum of ethos so that specialized economic understanding may enter the service of the right goals.

Was that U.S. President-elect Barack Obama? Maybe World Bank President Robert Zoellick? Perhaps International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn? Or U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon? In fact, the guy with his finger on the financial pulse was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in his 1985 paper "Market Economy and Ethics." Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005.

So maybe you should be guiding your firstborn toward the priesthood, especially in these economically challenged times. As the pope said last month, "Money vanishes, it is nothing; the only solid reality is the word of God."

Cars are individualistic, bad for the environment and increasingly frustrating in a gridlocked world - all so 20th century. With Obama as U.S. president and governments in Europe rediscovering their socialist principles, improved public transport will soon be back on the agenda. Remember when every small boy wanted to be a train driver?

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