"I'm pushing around 60 million in Euros every day and I have no idea how to balance a checkbook." This is how my conversation started with a 23-year-old hedge fund trader. "I'll be clearin' almost 100k this year," he added, "before bonus, of course. You should write an article about me."

"Before taxes, too," I offered sadistically. He replied with something along the lines of "Too bad we can't move the whole exchange to Dubai."

Later that night I would find myself on Manhattan's South Street Seaport, a popular hangout for first- and second-year analysts, drinking overpriced cocktails and watching money mingle with money. It was an alluring scene: a gorgeous sunset; successful, young, attractive men and women wearing designer clothes, smiling and chatting about banking and politics.

But that was last summer.

The glamorous life of the Wall Street freshman, an exclusive world that has become less reclusive in recent years — as markets roared and tell-all books and blogs proliferated — has finally met a stiff demise.

All the Ferragamo loafers and Italian suits in the world won't be able to ease nerves on Wall Street this fall, and even the freshmen know that. After a series of record years up and down the street — when the largest hedge fund managers pulled in more than $1 billion apiece in a single fiscal year — the cost of extraordinary risk has finally caught up with banking titans, and we shouldn't feel guilty about relishing that.

When we look back at Bear Stearns' 35 to one leveraging — that's to say gambling $395 billion in assets with only $11.1 billion of capital behind it — or the recklessness with which banks securitized and traded CDOs tainted with loans even casual observers suspected were ticking time bombs, it's hard not to wish the harshest of days upon Wall Street.

But, in the ironic fashion that fate so often works, our only hope, we're told, is to turn the better part of a trillion dollars over to one of the gamblers who oversaw the rapid expansion of such reckless economics as an investment bank executive.

Speaking with those immersed in the financial world again this week, the reality that each of our wallets are inextricably linked to securing financial institutions and mortgages was unavoidable.

Asked if Congress should cut Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson the blank check, there was a resounding response: There's no other choice. A successful bailout, most conjectured, will require far more than $700 billion, though. It will require effectively detoxifying the financial markets of all bad loans: sub-primes, Alt-A's and others teetering on the edge. Potentially several trillion dollars worth of debt. It will also require restructuring those mortgages the government seizes, thus stopping foreclosures and slowing the spiraling of all real estate prices.

But I hope Americans don't let their representatives sign over such power to Paulson without significant oversight, and without consequences for those banks that greedily dashed into such pitfalls. Executive compensation should be stiffly limited for any bank accepting a bailout. I'd like to see executive salaries reduced to minimum wage equivalents. Paulson must be accountable for the measures he takes, and Senate and House finance committees must be granted the power to advise and oversee his work.

It was early summer 2007 when I found myself mingling with Wall Street's young guard. There were record-high market closings in the rearview mirror and economists seemed to have calmed ravings about the "housing market cool-off." The idea that abrupt decline was simply a correction and that markets would rebound was prevalent. Those around me were young, rich and on top of the world.

Now, a year later, the tell all memoirs and financial blogs they worship and reference on a daily basis have become much more than summer reads. They've turned into abhorrent confessions of those that ran up tremendous fortune with instruments and language too intricate for much of America to understand.

Of those that will go without bonuses in years when many lose their homes and life savings.

I talked to my trader early in the week. He, like many, was biding time. Those that haven't lost jobs are looking for the next angle. "Oct. 3," he said, the date when restrictions will be lifted on selling short, a tactic used to make profits and grind stock prices downward, "it'll be the wild West again."

Such is the life of a Wall Street freshman, and such is the insatiable greed that has brought our economy to its knees.

Brian Till can be contacted at brian.m.till@gmail.com. To find out more about the author and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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