Goodbye to Greed (but Not to Good) ; Wall Street May Be Coming Back From the Brink a Year After It Collapsed, but a Clutch of One-Time Hotshot Investment Bankers has Few Regrets About Bidding Adieu to the Greed-Is-Good Culture to Plough a New Furrow.

Summary

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Till last September, Shruti Aggarwal, investment banker in the infrastructure group of Merrill Lynch Inc. in New York, was busy advising her clients on managing funding gaps and refinancing mortgages on which they had defaulted. As rival firms like Bear Stearns collapsed and UBS shut its infrastructure advisory group, Shruti's diary was choc-a-block with appointments with clients.

Around the same time, Rakesh Maini, a 23-year-old actuarial science graduate from New York University, was busy helping his senior portfolio managers at JP Morgan in New York bring down exposure to risky instruments, and convincing clients such as endowment funds that their money was safe with JP Morgan. It was a nerve-wracking period as Rakesh couldn't afford to make any mistakes in punching trade orders of clients. It wasn't, after all, a time to make mistakes.

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Extract

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Goodbye to Greed (but Not to Good) ; Wall Street May Be Coming Back From the Brink a Year After It Collapsed, but a Clutch of One-Time Hotshot Investment Bankers has Few Regrets About Bidding Adieu to the Greed-Is-Good Culture to Plough a New Furrow.

Cut to September 2009. If you think Shruti is still burning rubber on Wall Street, well that's not quite the case. Instead, she's busy these days strolling on Fifth Avenue, checking out the latest fashion trends and swimwear brands. That's because yesterday's I-banker has turned entrepreneur: Shruti has launched an online swimwear store, Secret Cache, which supplies to premium hotels in India.

As for Rakesh, he's thousands of miles away from the boroughs ...

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