Something is wrong with these numbers. An average employee of a Wall Street firm (be it a fund or a bank) did not bring home $600k in total compensation even in the best of times (2006-2007). I think average wall street income is more like $350k and I am not even sure where Miller-Samuel takes this data. Once the average number is right, you'd have to correct the total compensation for (a) education, with a proper quality corrector, so you don't compare MIT graduates with the graduates of University of Arizona, Phoenix (b) location of employment - to give you a sense, many police officers and firemen in the NYC bring home over two hundred thousand (c) total value of current and future benefits (Wall Street has none to speak of) (d) hours laboured - an average securities firm employee in the New York City works 55 hours a week I would love for someone to do that analysis...
the vast amount of jobs on wallstreet and im talking probably about 80% if i had to guess are support roll jobs. back office stuff. ok, the average salary is probably like 40 grand with a 3k bonus and dont even bother asking for more. so these asinine inflated numbers are just looking at the most prestigious jobs on wallstreet. its like saying hospital employees make on average 350k. but they only included surgeons and forgot about the associate degree nurse that is mopping up shit.
One thing that people seem to ignore with respect to Wall Street employment is the volatility of income and uncertainty of employment. E.g. a NYC police officer has to work for 20 years to be guaranteed a nice pension. For a beat cop it's 58k a year, for a detective 60k a year. Now, that's a guy that did two years of community college (pretty much free), took the cop exam at the age of 21 and retired at the age of 42. PV that, include the inflation adjustments and you get numbers on the order of 2 to 3 million dollars. I do not think an average wall street employee has a nest egg of 2 million dollars by the age of 42, especially considering the tax rates.
Yup, if you take the five-six thousand people that work in direct revenue producing roles or in senior management, these numbers do make sense. This, however, is very much like saying "look at the top actors income" when looking at the entertainment industry.
Could it be self-selecting bias? Those with higher than normal incomes are more likely to report it to a survey like this whereas those in the lower brackets are not? I'd also be curious about how these numbers are confirmed... one cannot exactly call an employer to find out what someone working there makes. I'm not saying *everyone* stretches the truth ... but ...
Right, once you factor in variance and compare it to the public sector, Wall Street people don't make shit. You have to calculate the expected value of lifetime of work plus benefits and adjust for variance. In other words, if Wall Street people had a sharpe ratio it would be under 1. Where as many in the public sector would have sharpes over 3.
It's also an average which is always a flawed measure because a few outliers can skew the whole data set.