The mood among bank staff... everything is shut down by compliance, and if they could, they'd work in a different industry. People I know at banks, anyway.
Imagine tons of meetings about new/impending regulations that are unclear, poorly defined, restrictive, and enforced by regulatory employees who don't always understand the nuances of the businesses they are overseeing.
Imagine your compliance officer coming over to you or a coworker to give you news of an investigation of trading activity that happened months ago.
Imagine banks hiring compliance employees to keep up with a growing number of regulations, and firing IT guys to pay for it.
Imagine being quoted on the biggest trade of the year by a client who is screaming at your salesman for a price, and having to mentally iterate through a checklist of "is this over X dollars notional, does it surpass Y position limit, etc" because you have been in ten different meetings where compliance officers passed out Powerpoint presentations outlining new rules.
Imagine seeing an opportunity for a great trade, but doing nothing about it because you can't justify opening a new position in a subsector where you have no client positions.
Imagine having your emails and messages frequently investigated by regulatory bodies because they were flagged by a word search or some other unsophisticated screening tool, and being asked to write an explanation of months-old conversations that you have since forgotten. After a while, you don't feel comfortable putting anything in writing at all, even if you follow every rule in the book.
But you live in an expensive place and pay a lot of tax.
Plus the politics in a shrinking industry, you need a big premium to suffer through it.
A lot of people who work in banks do not have a particular love of the industry, they're there because it's what paid well when they finished university.
