Clearly, the industry of investment banking has, along side private equity and hedge funds, been under much scrutiny from several angles in the past years. This is not least because of the monumental sums of money which pour through the likes of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs every year but also because of the ever more detailed instruments deployed to leverage, hedge and split risk. On the one hand we could see this as the epiphany of modern day's efficient and enduring capitalism or on the other hand as hollow wizadry which is only going to make the crash even greater when it eventually comes to drag investors into the abyss.
There is a huge special issue of the Economist, all about the many flavors of Investment Banking, titled The Alchemists of Finance. [...]
It's in the kiosk right now, I purchased it and it will proudly sit in my toilets for a few weeks until I finish reading it :).
