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A few months ago, a column in the Wall Street Journal described a "sense of malaise" sweeping through the ranks of Wall Street's dealmakers. Though well-compensated, thanks to the M&A boom, investment bankers were stuck in something of an existential crisis, the column informed. They felt insecure, insignificant, unwanted and, worst of all, unnecessary to the dealmaking process.
Fast-forward to this past week. That same column in The Wall Street Journal — The Game — once again dropped in on life on Wall Street. Its conclusion: Dealmakers essentially have it made. Wall Street's bonus system, it argues, provides bankers with short-term profits without long-term risk. If an investment bank ever offers you such a job, the column advises, "grab it and don't let go. It can be a beautiful gig."
That is, as long as you have no objections to living with a debilitating "sense of malaise." What's interesting about these two pieces, aside from their warring theses — in one, dealmakers are depressed and dissatisfied; in the next, they're perpetual over-reachers who operate free from accountability — is that they exist at all. Written by Dennis Berman, The Game, a biweekly column, was launched in February in conjunction with, fittingly enough, the paper's Deal Journal blog. And with it, Berman joined the ranks of M&A beat reporters — ink-stained wretches who follow and report on deal markets, dealmakers, and deal news day in and day out — opining with surprising regularity on the people and topics they cover. The Game, like Andrew Ross Sorkin's Dealbook column in the Sunday New York Times, isn't news; it's commentary. "[S]omebody has got to go to bat for [Steve] Schwarzman. Might as well be me," offered Sorkin one recent Sunday. But should it be him? Just asking. Call us hopelessly old-fashioned, but we long for those now-ancient days when reporters were reporters and columnists were columnists. The latter trafficked in opinion, the former in news, and for journalists — at least of the M&A variety — the two never really met except in the cafeteria. That doesn't mean that a reporter's biases and feelings, or those of his employer, didn't drift into allegedly objective news stories, or the occasional CNBC appearance. Still, in the old days, the turn of this century, say, we never really knew what deal reporters thought about the people they were covering, at least not to the extent we do now. But at a time when every citizen with a snowman suit is considered a journalist, it makes sense that every professional journalist is being turned into a columnist, or at least a blogger, free — and even encouraged — to traffic in opinion and attitude with abandon. (We at The Deal are as guilty as anyone else of participating in this trend.) By not keeping the reporting and opining functions separate, however, we're left with some pretty weird situations here in M&A land. Why exactly did Sorkin defend Schwarz- man? Is it what he truly believes? Or did he do it to curry favor with a powerful source? Or to be contrarian and provocative? And in Berman's latest column, he refers to Wall Street as "a free-rider's paradise, where individuals can stack up short-term benefits for themselves, while letting the institution bear the brunt of their actions." Come on, Dennis, tell us how you really feel! To make his point, he dredges up none other than the disgraced Jack Grubman, hinting that over-reaching dealmakers are essentially criminals (Grubman was technically an analyst not a banker, but no matter). It's an interesting perspective from someone who relies on this crowd for his M&A reporting. The other problem is that opinion journalism is hard work. (We should know.) You have to have a point of view and argue it effectively, which is not exactly the same skill set required for news gathering and reporting. And avoiding received wisdom is difficult. Berman's thesis that dealmakers don't take risk and have no accountability is becoming something of a mantra among the Wall-Street-is-too-greedy set. We've seen it pop up in comments by "The Last Tycoons" author William Cohan (in a Q&A on Berman's Deal Journal blog, no less) and in a recent column by Kurt Andersen in New York magazine. But Andersen and Cohan, who wrote his own version of the dealmakers-are-dissatisfied story for the Financial Times in which he tipped his hat to Berman's column — a bit of logrolling in our time — aren't on the daily deal beat. They can say what they want about dealmakers today without worrying about how it will affect their news reporting tomorrow. No risk there.—Yvette Kantrow
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