Bankers may need 50 years to restore lost credibility

Discredited and vilified. Those are the words that can begin to describe the people most Americans would term "bankers". Rarely has a broadly defined category of occupation sunk so far, so fast.

Not too long ago, careers in finance beckoned the ambitious and avaricious. In New York, in particular, the only lives worth living seemed to be led by those who worked on Wall Street and whose compensation was determined in widely reported, year-end, life-altering bonuses.

That ended, I suspect, shortly after noon on Friday, Oct 3, when the US House of Representatives passed the $700 billion financial-market rescue plan designed to re-open the nation's credit markets.