In the new year, I hope..

As the year comes to an end, I couldn't resist posting these dialogues from my favorite movie - Shawshank Redemption. To those who have been already rejected, or those who're waiting for their decisions, or those who're applying in R2/R3, all I ask is to hope. Hope that you'll crawl through your river of shit and come out clean on the other side.


Andy: Dear Red. If you're reading this, you've gotten out. And if you've come this far, maybe you're willing to come a little further. You remember the name of the town, don't you? I could use a good man to help me get my project on wheels. I'll keep an eye out for you and the chessboard ready. Remember, Red. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well. Your friend. Andy.

Red: I find I am so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain... I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.

Wishing you all a successful new year 2010 !

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??).

My list

Doesnt it seem my blog is flooding today? Three blogs in an hour, with three different topics .I'll try to be as regular as possible now, no spurts of posts and then dead for a long time. Come on guys, consistency is the key !
This is the list of the schools I came up with after my initial round of research. Need to cut down the list to 5-6 or may be 7. So which are the unlucky ones(or may be lucky) not to have my precious application submitted :) ? Soon, very soon

INSEAD
LBS
Tuck,Dartmouth
Chicago GSB
Kellogg , Northwestern
UCLA Anderson
ISB
Fuqua School of Business, Duke University
Darden,Univeristy of Virginia
Oxford
Michigan, Ross
UNC Chapel Hill
McCombs, UT Austin
Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon