Occupy Wall Street Protesting Carlos Slim at Saks Fifth Avenue

As the richest man in the world, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú has his hand in many honeypots including the phone company Telmex, the New York Times, and apparently Saks Fifth Avenue. Itself an icon of Manhattan luxury, protesters have picked the department store for a four-day rally beginning this afternoon: What's left of Occupy Wall Street plans to join forces with Yo Soy 132, the similarly amorphous Mexican student group, under the umbrella of what they're calling "Two Countries, One Voice," for a demonstration against Slim's "monopolistic practices" at his telecommunications companies. "Carlos Slim is the 1 percent of the 1 percent," said one Occupy organizer. But the would-be villain himself won't be there, and doesn't seem to be sweating it.

As of now, the Facebook group for the event boasts just about 250 RSVPs (and another 175 "maybes"). "Slim is the world's richest man, the largest stakeholder in Saks Fifth Avenue, and has been accused of overcharging impoverished Mexicans by over $129 billion as owner of Mexico's largest phone company," the group stresses. "What better way to protest predatory greed by taking over his Fifth Avenue store?"

By attaching its name to the international cause, Occupy Wall Street is again exercising what's left of its cachet on disparate causes. With domestic elections coming up, the once-strong movement has not demonstrated much of a resurgence at all and has shown a sustained disinterest in traditional political channels. The last time Occupy came out strong, on May Day, the group relied on a coalition of immigrant and labor groups that gave them strength in numbers, but spread the message thin. This latest action seems to indicate a similar tack, for better or worse.

From their golden perches, Slim's team is snide in their dismissal, questioning whether the protesters are even real, Reuters reports:

Today, perfume samples will probably have to do.

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The Long and Winding Road: Careerist Confusion on Wall Street

The kind folks from Wall Street Oasis, a website and forum for aspiring and current financiers of all stripes, invited me to moderate a panel at their inaugural conference over the weekend. The panel, titled "Exit Opps," consisted of four financiers — two from hedge funds, one from private equity, and one from a big bank — who spoke about the various paths entry-level financiers can take after their first jobs.

What struck me most about the conference was the undercurrent of confusion. Despite hearing a surfeit of wisdom from a roster of successful panelists, none of the audience members I spoke to afterwards seemed certain of the steps that would help them become Masters of the Universe. In fact, judging from my (admittedly brief) interactions with conferencegoers, it seems that the financial industry's basic career ladder has been replaced with something much less stable and much harder to navigate.

Climbing the ladder on Wall Street used to be a relatively straightforward process, at least for entry-level financiers with good pedigrees. A young Ivy League graduate would do a two-year stint as an investment banking analyst before either (a) heading to business school, after which he'd return to the bank as an associate and continue the upward march to VP, MD, and partner, or (b) decamping to the "buy side," the prestigious world of private equity firms and hedge funds, where the pay was more lucrative and the hours more relaxed.

There were other ways to make it — Lloyd Blankfein, for example, practiced tax law until he came into Goldman through the J. Aron side door — but the traditional path to the brass ring was well-worn and venerated.

These days, though, as Gabriel Sherman reported earlier this year, the brass ring appears to be smaller and tarnished, and the path to it seems more labyrinthine than ever. In the course of an afternoon at the WSO conference, I heard people asking questions about making lateral moves between analyst programs, the possibility of returning to the sell-side from the buy-side, the advantages of equity research over investment banking, and the wisdom of quitting banking after two years to do something else entirely.

In her book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, Karen Ho writes at length about the liquidity of the Wall Street job market. Among her points is that the financial industry is quicker than most sectors to hire and fire its employees when prevailing winds change:

That kind of instability — the worry that I might be laid off if my specific corner of the market becomes less profitable — has always existed on Wall Street. (Bond traders, for example, had a field day in the eighties, but saw their skill sets go out of vogue in the nineties.)

What seems different today is that even the most basic assumptions of Wall Street careerism — that buy-side is better than sell-side, that front-office is better than middle-office, that bulge-bracket banks are better than boutiques — have come into question.

Take, for example, the news last week that Jefferies — a small bank that few outside the finance world have likely heard of — set aside more money in per-employee compensation during the first six months of this year than Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, or Morgan Stanley.

Imagine that you're a Harvard senior who has investment banking offers from both Jefferies and Morgan Stanley. If your goal is to maximize your earning potential, you might still go to Morgan Stanley even if it pays slightly less, under the assumption that working at a more prestigious firm will give you more lucrative buy-side offers in the future.

But if you're a Harvard senior who takes the long view, you might instead think: If I take a job at Morgan Stanley and end up in a unit that shrinks or is targeted by a regulatory shift (or if the bank, god forbid, decides to break itself up), I might be out of a job. And then, if I can't find a lateral move right away, I'll have a résumé gap, and I'll miss the private equity recruiting cycle, and then I'll never get that offer from Blackstone, and I'll end up doing equities in Dallas.

And you might decide — for purely selfish reasons! — that a Jefferies offer doesn't look so shabby after all.

There is, without a doubt, still huge demand for finance gigs among many high-achieving twentysomethings, even though (as I've reported before) the Occupy movement and the growth of the tech sector have made some would-be financiers think twice.

What's changed is that in the age where the Wall Street prestige hierarchy is in such flux and the outlook for big banks so uncertain, even those die-hards who do decide to become the next Steve Schwarzmans are increasingly uncertain about how to do it. And older financiers, whose own paths to riches are quickly becoming obsolete, seem to have very little idea what to tell them.

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