Adieu L'ancien Regime

Plucked from off the front page of the Weekend Edition of the WSJ today:

"For financial institutions, 'the clock is ticking a heck of a lot faster today,' said Matthew Kelley, a bank analyst at investment banking firm Sterne, Agee and Leach, Inc...".

So it's come to this: the days of quoting banking analysts at the storied investment banks (Goldman, Morgan Stanley etc....) are now gone forever. We are left to quote the obscure; no offense meant to the good people at Sterne, Agee and Leach. Wow......if ever you needed a handy way to measure the magnitude of change on the Street!

It's almost like the extinction of the dinosaurs.....when the giants that utterly dominated the landscape suddenly disappear; the furry, little brown mammals- so long trampled underfoot emerge timorously into the daylight- without fear of being squashed or eaten, to forage amidst the detritus, and pick up where the leviathans left off. Adieu l'ancien regime.