We are witnessing the decline and fall of investment banking as we have known it for the past 40 years.
现在，投资银行业正在经历衰退和没落，难复过去40年间的辉煌。
The evidence is everywhere. The increasing regulations on Wall Street — as required by the Dodd-Frank law and still being written by the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and others agencies in the US and Europe — will require the remaining companies to increase their capital, curb their risk-taking and reduce their principal investing.
投资银行业陷入困境的证据无处不在。多德弗兰克法案的制定将使华尔街面临更为严厉的监管，美联储，美国证券与交易委员会，美国商品期货交易委员会以及其他美国和欧洲金融监管结构也正在酝酿更为严厉的监管方案，这些措施将使得苟延生存的投资公司不得不增加投资资本，遏制投资风险并减少其主要投资。
Aside from the fact that investing principal and proprietary risk-taking per se had nothing to do with the financial crisis — and that the ability of Goldman Sachs Group to make a huge proprietary bet against the mortgage market probably helped save the firm — these new rules will curb Wall Street’s revenue and profitability at a time when the business itself is suffering a severe slowdown. (What sunk Wall Street in 2008 was the seemingly more conventional business of the manufacture, packaging and sale of increasingly risky mortgage-backed and other debt securities.)
抛开投资本金和风险本身与金融危机并无关系这一事实，也不讨论高盛押宝抵押贷款市场崩溃（这一行为使公司逃过一劫）——这些新的监管措施将限制华尔街的收益和获利能力，在商业环境本已如此萧条的背景下，这无疑是雪上加霜。（制造，包装，销售风险日益上升的住房抵押贷款产品以及其他债务证券产品的传统业务，是华尔街在2008年遭受重创的原因。）
Not being able to make those big proprietary bets when you see them developing — in effect, the closing of the casino that Wall Street has become over the past few decades — will severely limit bankers’ money-making opportunities. It will also protect the rest of us when those big bets go wrong or are perceived to be too risky. (For every Goldman Sachs acting brilliantly, there is an MF Global Holdings acting foolishly).
即便发现投资机会，投行也不能激进下注——过去几十年间造就的华尔街赌场，如今一朝关闭——这一事实会大大减少银行家的获利机会。同时，这些限制错误投资或风险过大投资的监管措施，其实也是对我们大多数人的保护。（高盛每走一步好棋，全球曼氏金融就会走一步臭棋。）
There is little debate anymore that Wall Street had become highly dependent on its trading operations. Something like 90 percent of Bear Stearns’s profits in the years leading up to its March 2008 demise came from its trading and debt-origination activities. At Goldman Sachs in 2010, its traditional investment-banking operations generated only $1.3 billion of $12.9 billion in pretax earnings, about 10 percent.
毫无疑问，华尔街已经高度依赖交易操作。贝尔斯通2008年3月破产的时候，公司90%的收入来源于交易和贷款融资。高盛2010年税前盈利129亿美元，其中传统投行业务盈利13亿美元，仅占总收入10%。
The slowdown in business, combined with the looming trading curbs, has resulted in job losses across Wall Street. Morgan Stanley recently announced it was firing 1,600 employees. Goldman Sachs has done its usual turn of eliminating the bottom 10 percent of its workforce and a group of its long-serving partners. Bank of America announced that about 30,000 employees would be chopped by the end of 2012, although a number of the firm’s investment bankers lost their jobs in the past month.
业务放缓，加之隐现的交易限制措施，华尔街上刮起了裁员风暴。摩根士丹利最近宣布裁员1600人。高盛业已完成基层裁员10%，并与一些长期服务的合作伙伴解除了关系。美国银行宣布将在2012年底前裁员3万人，而一些该公司的投资银行家已经在上个月失去了工作。
Yet those suffering the most are the foreign firms that were trying to break into Wall Street’s business. Nomura Holdings has pretty much scuttled its most recent Wall Street experiment (it bought Lehman Brothers Holding Inc.’s European and Asian banking operations) and firms such as Societe Generale Credit Suisse Group and Royal Bank of Scotland Group are all cutting Wall Street bodies.
然而，受影响最大的还是那些意图进军华尔街的外国公司。野村控股已经放弃其大多数华尔街业务（该公司曾经买下雷曼兄弟在欧洲和亚洲的银行业务）。兴业银行，瑞士信贷集团和苏格兰皇家银行等公司也纷纷削减了在华尔街的业务。
In November, Bloomberg News estimated that more than 200,000 people who work in finance had already lost or would lose their jobs this year.
彭博新闻在11月时预计今年将有超过20万金融界人士失去工作。
The vast sums overpaid to bankers and traders will inevitably continue to fall as well — as many of them are finding out this bonus week. The decline in Wall Street’s compensation will mean less tax revenue for New York City and New York State and fewer government services for the rest of us (absent higher taxes).
除了工作，银行家和交易员的巨额薪酬也将不可避免的继续缩水——对他们当中的很多人而言，这个奖金周就会见分晓。华尔街薪酬的降低，意味着纽约城和纽约州的税收减少，而我们可享受的政府公共服务也将缩水。
The most reliable leading indicator of Wall Street’s future prospects is the way recent graduates of Harvard, Princeton and Yale — supposedly our best and brightest — choose to spend their time after graduating. For years, hordes of graduates from those schools beat a fast path to Wall Street. Now the road is far more difficult to travel. There is the prospect of incurring the wrath and scorn of fellow students who make up the various Occupy Wall Street movements — a fact not likely to deter many — and then there are dimmer prospects for a job on Wall Street generally, what with the slowdown in business.
华尔街未来前景最可靠的风向标，莫过于哈佛、耶鲁、普林斯顿等名校毕业生的就业选择。多年来，这些学校的毕业生如过江之鲫涌向华尔街。如今，这条道路变得更加难走。选择这条道路的人，不但要忍受参与占领运动的同学的白眼和嘲弄——这并不能阻止他们前行的脚步——即便在华尔街找到一份工作，也还要在不景气的经济环境下苦苦挣扎。
According to a Dec. 21 article in the New York Times, whereas in 2006 some 46 percent of Princeton graduates who had jobs lined up after graduation went to Wall Street, four years later that number had fallen to 36 percent. At Harvard, in 2006, a quarter of the class got jobs in finance; by 2011, that number had fallen to 17 percent. At Yale, in 2006, 24 percent of the graduates had jobs in finance and on Wall Street, while in 2010, the number of graduates going to Wall Street had fallen to 14 percent.
根据《纽约时报》12月21日一篇文章中的数据，2006年时，46%的普林斯顿大学毕业生选择在金融行业就业，四年后这一数字降至36%。2006年时，25%的哈佛大学毕业生选择在金融行业就业，到2011年，这一数字下降到17%。2006年时，24%的耶鲁大学毕业生选择在金融行业就业，到2010年，这一数字已经下降至14%。
The word around Goldman Sachs, I’m told, is that even those offered a still highly coveted entry-level job at the firm are having second thoughts about taking it. More and more, banks are losing talent to Teach for America, a fact that may turn out to be one of the most heartening consequences of the financial crisis.
目前流传的一个关于高盛的传闻：即便高盛公司愿意提供入门工作机会，求职者们还是会犹豫该不该进入投资银行工作。在美国，越来越多的人才离开银行业投身教育，这可能是经济危机带来的最令人欣慰的影响之一。
