Well, you have the right bankerly deportment, that's for sure :)
I particularly liked your comment: "A few management books are keen on talking about how there used to be massive waste on corporate balance sheets in the pre-LBO, pre-downsizing, pre-lean-and-mean 1970s (corporate jets and the like), but on the other hand, in those days you didn't get massive stock option packages, and the sudden discovery of an 'international market in executive talent' which doesn't exist." Drexel Burnham, thou art with us still.
And re your: "The real point, I think, where banks and capital markets score over bureaucracies is the ease of entry and exit to the class of capital allocators ... Bureaucracies are also vulnerable to groupthink."
Hmm, maybe it's *too* easy to become a capital allocator. A few years years ago, the once-mighty Continental Illinois Bank received a $5 billion bailout from the Feds because Continental Illinois improvidently bought scads of oil-sector loans generated by tiny Penn Square Bank (an outfit based in an Oklahoma City shopping center) under a good ol' boy lending officer named Bill Patterson, who (as I recall) used to drink champagne out of a cowboy boot when he closed a big deal and in college had been called "Monkeybrains" by his fraternity brothers. Concerning your second point above -- from what I've seen, *every* segment of the capital formation and allocation industry is dominated by groupthink.
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