EDITOR'S TAKE: Fabrice Tourre's emails and the big bonus justification

Fabrice Tourre's emails to his girlfriend may not do his cause many favours, claiming as they do, that he was peddling his CDO wares to "widows and orphans", but they do at least illustrate why people who work in investment banking tend to be so handsomely compensated.

In one email, Fabulous writes:

"... I am now considered a "dinosaur" in this business (at my firm the average longevity of an employee is about 2-3 years!!!) people ask me about career advice. I feel like I'm losing my mind and I'm only 28!!! OK, I've decided two more years of work and I'm retiring."

And in another, he complains that:

I'm still stuck at work at 10PM, but it's been six years I've been functioning on this @!$#@!$@!# schedule, so who cares.

Now, you may not have much sympathy for Fabrice and his alleged $2m bonus, but his missives do embody the justifications typically put forward for banking pay. These are that:

1) Investment banking careers are often prematurely and involuntarily curtailed

2) Junior bankers have to work very, very hard (on an hourly basis, it's often claimed that IBD analysts receive close to the minimum wage).

Admittedly, Fabrice may be an extreme case. His career is unlikely to resume any time soon, and even if he weren't as notorious as Jerome Kerviel, CDO expertise isn't exactly a boom hiring area. However, that banking careers tend to be more intense, more exhausting, and shorter lived than the average profession, is hard to deny.

"If you lose your job in front office banking at 28-35 you'll have no problem finding a new one," says Linda Jackson, managing consultant of the City practice at talent consultancy and outplacement firm Fairplace. "But if you lose your job at 40, I advise people to take their age off their CV. And by your mid-40s finding a new role becomes more of a struggle," she says.

Despite Tourre's claims that most people in his business lasted only two or three years, his own career seems to have gone on for nearly a decade. Nevertheless, that $2m bonus will now have to last a very long time. Fabulous Fabrice was definitely well paid, but he wasn't that well paid. And he had to work until 10pm every night.