The writer is a former investment banker and author of ‘Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon’Once upon a time, if you wanted high pay and high prestige on Wall Street, you aspired to be a mergers and acquisitions banker, the person who advised corporate chief executives on their most important strategic deals.

And if you wanted the highest pay and the highest prestige, you aspired to be an M&A banker at groups such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lazard and First Boston, the places where the biggest and most exciting M&A deals were happening.

In those days, it was nothing for a first-year M&A managing director at Morgan Stanley to be paid $1.5mn, or more. And if you were a rainmaker such as Felix Rohatyn, at Lazard, or Bruce Wasserstein, at First Boston, your pay was easily in the tens of millions of dollars a year, back when that was still considered real money.