Michael Lewis has long been an astute observer of Wall Street. He got a glimpse from the inside of Salomon Brothers, which yielded his classic Liar's Poker. He delivered another winning read with The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, all about one money manager and the latest-mortgage-backed boom.

He makes a lot of sense when he tells City AM: "People who work on Wall Street lack a sense of their own absurdity. The people who are running big firms don't sit back and say: ‘This is crazy! This is not that useful to society, it's crazy that we are paid by a factor or 10 times or more than our fathers were for doing the same job'. There is nothing in your brain to regulate your material ambitions, and once that happens then you start doing things like creating CDOs so that you can short them, you take that extra step to screw the customer. If you had some realistic constraint you just wouldn't do that."

Here's a bold statement: "This is a prediction that is going to come back and haunt me, but I think that Goldman Sachs is doomed. I don't think that in its current form it can survive."

It looks like the bank will survive. We'll have to see whether it can thrive.

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