> To be fair, the clients are paying the banks tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for this work. And the work is time sensitive--a bond offering today may price differently from one tomorrow.

I get that, even though though the closest I've come is having a banker struggle to keep it civil as I passed on the message that no we couldn't just fudge the asset valuation after the client admitted at the last minute they'd supplied us with an incorrect detail, and no our analysts were going to do it tomorrow, not this evening. But as they stood to earn four orders of magnitude more than we did from them and actually had more competition they weren't in the same position to tell the client that we weren't going to drop everything to rectify their error.

I thought the division of labour problem was more of an issue than a salary at the entry level though, not so much because a pitchbook can't be handed to a suitably qualified employee on a different continent to finish but because they don't trust that setup. Dividing the pie between more senior bankers is obviously going to cause consternation, but surely a few extra graduate analysts isn't going to dramatically affect Goldman's bottom line, especially if they can cut those entry level salaries a bit and still retain more?