Nothing less than a generational transformation of investment banking and
the financial services industry at large. Its implications for, among
other things, the economies of New York City and London, the structure of global
capital markets, and our own dearly beloved industry, are impossible to predict
with any high degree of confidence, but I think we already know a few things.
First, as an AmLaw 50 Chairman I know well put it to me yesterday, "the business
model of 35 times assets:equity ratios is over." That works great
in flush times but it kills you (literally) in times like these.
"Lend long and borrow short" was always a game that threatened to turn the tables on you at the worst times in the nastiest of fashions, and it turns out that "invest long and borrow short" is no less so.
Does this mean that the "Masters of the Universe" investment banks will more closely come to resemble–or pair up with–conventional deposit-taking banks? Of course, that’s already happening, and we can envision a world where financial services institutions break down into:
- Truly global mega-banks (Bank of America, Candidate A) which take deposits, issue credit cards, offer mortgages, cater to every customer from retail walk-in checking account folks to small businesses, luxury private wealth management, and Fortune 500 underwritings;
- Boutiques offering investment advisory services, M&A counsel, and the like (think Greenhill or Evercore);
- Hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital (Blackstone, SAC, KKR, Kleiner Perkins); and
- Unknown and undefined institutions yet to be invented and unfurled.
The last point is the most important. Investment banking reinvents itself (by opportunity and necessity) every decade or so, and there’s no reason to imagine this time will be any different. Where does this innovation come from? At the risk of contradicting my next point, historically it has come from New York. And who does it? Creative and, yes, greedy, investment bankers, but also lawyers at the premiere firms, working hand in glove to imagine, craft, and define the products and services the industry will offer in its new incarnation.
Depressed and demoralized? The sin, we know, in America, is not being knocked down. It’s failing to jump right back up. We may have seen the end of investment banking as we’ve known it for the latter half of the first decade of this century, but we have not seen the end of creative financial engineering.
Second, this cannot be good news for the economy of New York City.
This pains me, as a Manhattan native born and bred, but I value realism over sentiment.
London already has the unspeakable advantage of time zone: If you want to do business with North America and Asia (not to mention the Mid East) in one day, London is a terrific place to be. It also happens to be a very civilized place to live, and it’s possible to do so in fine style provided one’s pay is denominated in pounds Sterling.
As for New York (the numbers vary), something on the order of 10% of all jobs in the City are/were in financial services, but they account for 25% of total payroll and a "multiplier effect" of 3 jobs per financial services sector job–which produce average annual salaries of $280,000. If you cut substantially into that employment, purchasing power, and tax base, as we’re in the process of doing, everything from demand for caterers to jewelry to BMW’s and co-op apartments is going to decline. Stemming the pain, we can only hope, will be the "America on sale" psychology, and reality, of the weak dollar, bringing foreigners here to drive demand for everything from, again, iPhones at the Apple Stores to Fifth Avenue apparel to Central Park West co-ops.
In the long run, New York will always be the financial capital of North America, and in some symbolic, enduring, and romantic, gritty, black & white night-time rain-soaked pavement sense, the port of entry to the American dream. But it will have substantial, and ever-stiffening, competition on the global stage.
Third, this is indeed a fundamental de-leveraging of financial institutions worldwide, as nicely captured today in a front-page WSJ article:
The U.S. financial system resembles a patient in intensive care. The body is trying to fight off a disease that is spreading, and as it does so, the body convulses, settles for a time and then convulses again. The illness seems to be overwhelming the self-healing tendencies of markets. The doctors in charge are resorting to ever-more invasive treatment, and are now experimenting with remedies that have never before been applied. Fed Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, walking into a hastily arranged meeting with congressional leaders Tuesday night to brief them on the government’s unprecedented rescue of AIG, looked like exhausted surgeons delivering grim news to the family.
Fed and Treasury officials have identified the disease. It’s called deleveraging, or the unwinding of debt. […]
At least three things need to happen to bring the deleveraging process to an end, and they’re hard to do at once. Financial institutions and others need to fess up to their mistakes by selling or writing down the value of distressed assets they bought with borrowed money. They need to pay off debt. Finally, they need to rebuild their capital cushions, which have been eroded by losses on those distressed assets.
But many of the distressed assets are hard to value and there are few if any buyers. Deleveraging also feeds on itself in a way that can create a downward spiral: Trying to sell assets pushes down the assets’ prices, which makes them harder to sell and leads firms to try to sell more assets. That, in turn, suppresses these firms’ share prices and makes it harder for them to sell new shares to raise capital. Mr. Bernanke, as an academic, dubbed this self-feeding loop a "financial accelerator."
Now that there appears to be a sort of "Resolution Trust II" on the horizon, we may be out of the immediate woods. But there’s no question the financial services landscape is changing before our very eyes, in ways likely to last for the duration of many of our careers.
Fourth, it seems a virtual certainty, regardless of what happens in the US electorally in November, that we will be entering a more highly regulated world. And not just in the US, but in the EU as well.
You can applaud or decry this, ideologically, but everyone I speak to–unanimously–thinks it’s a foregone conclusion.
Now, regulation per se is always a good thing for the business of lawyers. Whether it’s a good thing for the economy and the vitality of our capital markets is something else altogether. On the whole, the consensus is that "new regulation is going to solve the problems that are already behind us. Just like Sarbox ‘solved’ the problem of Enron, retroactively, and just like the Transportation Security Department’s airport screening procedures ‘solve’ the problem of 9/11, seven years too late." (This from an AmLaw 25 managing partner I spoke with today.)
His view, and mine, is that regulation is always backward-looking, and tends to be an encrustation on an already-existing structure, rather than a clean-slate, "zero-based budgeting" analysis of what we really need going forward. You read it here first.
Fifth, this type of economic environment will accelerate segmentation and consolidation in our industry.
Among law firms as among financial institutions, there will be winners and losers emerging from this downturn. Among the "losers" we may already count Heller (look for a post-mortem in these pages to come) and Thelen and perhaps one or two others that will outright cease to exist. Short of dissolving, other firms will find their competitive postures impaired, their attractiveness to laterals and law students compromised, and their viability as independent going concerns in question.
David Morley, new senior partner of Allen & Overy, announced last week in conjunction with release of their Annual Report:
I see us becoming the most successful of the emerging global elite of law firms. Those firms are beginning to set themselves apart when defined by scale, geographic reach, quality of people and concentration on high end, premium work for the largest clients. As each year passes the members of that emerging group, and what it takes to succeed in it, become clearer.
This throws down the gauntlet, does it not?
Yet I for one believe David has it precisely right. There may be six, there may be 12, but there will not be an AmLaw 100 or a UK 50 of firms that are truly viewed as the most global of players catering to the most global of financial institutions and corporations as we move on down the road into the second decade of the 21st Century.
If you believe that the tectonic shifts in our financial services industry going on this week mean that the world will be comprised of fewer and larger institutions, will they not indeed look to commensurately globally capable law firms? I believe they shall and must.
Sixth, what do you do now?
I believe you ramp up your competitive efforts. This is not the hour of the timid or the paralyzed.
If you haven’t already figured out who you are and what you want to be, it is all but too late. Not "TOO late," but getting close. (And if you’re on the fence about where you are, can we talk?)
If you have it figured out, but aren’t there yet, this is the time to put your convictions to the test. Economic troughs like this don’t cement the status quo, as I’ve said before, they tend to disrupt it. Now’s the time for you to make your disruptive move. Incumbents may not like it, but there is no hereditary right of incumbency.
Above all, do not lose heart, be optimistic, believe in the value your firm and your partners can provide.
- Corporations’ demand for financing, for credit, for leverage, and for capital is not going to diminish.
- Globalization is here to stay.
- Regulation is not shrinking, it’s growing.
- Wall Street reinvents itself every decade or so; financial services are going to come back, securitization most prominently included.
Watch your costs.
Be opportunistic about the real estate landscape if you need to relocate or expand.
Hire and recruit prudently.
Ask probing questions about people and other assets who are on the street; it may be through no fault of their own, but then again.
Most of all:
Be bold. Fortunes are never made by buying at the top.
I’ve never seen so much opportunity as now.
