End of Investment Banking ??!!

Bankers,Economists and Financiers, pardon me for my lack of knowledge of finance if I said something weird !!

With the last two giants in IB, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, foraying into retail banking and said that investment banking is no longer viable for them, I started to wonder what might happen to the scores of Investment Bankers, wannabe-IBs - all who spent a good time of their life with the sole aim of becoming one. What's going to happen to all the top tier schools (even worse for the middle-tier bschools) that were/are known as "IB Strong schools". What's going to happen to all those 2nd year MBA students(a few who I know) with offers from the bankrupt Lehman Brothers and the sold-out Merrill Lynch and even worse, with the collapse rate of a bank/day(including the bailed out AIG, Fannie Freddie and the cheaply sold out WaMu) what's going to happen to all the Wall Street aspirants and the most dreaded thing, what's going to happen to Wall Street ITSELF !!

Are we going to see the US become a 90's Japan(with the whole financial market crumbling down) or even worse, are we going to see Great Depression II !!! So much for subprime mortgage ?? I know that recovery measures are underway in Main Street with the plan to use $700 billion for controlling the market but is that going to help? I am not going to delve into this matter, as I dont know the outcome nor the subtleties involved.

I think , if this is the status in the US , what's happening in the controlled environments of EU. I dont read a lot of this stuff, but I guess there are serious repurcussions in the EU too. We'll have to wait and see how the mystery unfolds.

But , Every cloud has a silver lining . These are indeed turbulent times but at the same time interesting too. The whole of finance industry will no doubt undergo a complete transformation. Ten years from now, banking will never be the same again, veterans wont be able to recognize the state of the industry and future generations might not know what it was like in the 00's.

I hope, there's some learning from these disasters. People studied the Great Depression and came up with laws and policies, they studied Japan's financial markets and came up with models, Five years down the line, I think professors, financial planners and experts are going to come up with models ,formulations and analyses of what went wrong now and teach the same to wannabe-(what would they be called??).