Even after being sent up to Capitol Hill and down again into the ignoble trenches of recovery, it was a great year for bankers: record revenues, salary increases, cute new nicknames from Matt Taibbi — it was almost like 2008 never even happened. The money kept flowing. Yet, for some of the denizens of Wall Street still small enough to fail, the cash kickbacks amounted to a new trend this bonus season: "the Zeros," or those supposedly snubbed of the bonuses they expected.
But you can't believe everything the Times tells you, even if the Street's biggest firms set aside more than the GDP of 13 entire countries (see left). You believe the people. So we went to the financial district late last week asking every banker we could find — at the bars, on the street corners, out front of a steakhouse — to take a short, unscientific, yet revealing survey. Given guys like Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, who's promising to take any employees leaking bonus information to the media and escort them out of the building himself, it wasn't easy, but we still found 98 respondents (81 men and 17 women) who were willing to talk.
Here's what they told us.
Originally Posted by yermom
