Dotcommers roam the coffee shops in daylight, retirees worry how they're going to make the payments on their Florida condos, refugees from Enron and Worldcom explain to sceptical employers that they were only following orders -- but spare a thought for the investment bankers who helped us get into this mess.

Pity for investment bankers? Not a feeling that comes naturally, but bear with me. The brokers and bankers of Wall Street and the City, who did so well out of the boom, will find the correction particularly painful. Because, for them, the adjustment is as much psychological as financial.

That investment bankers are being laid off in droves is neither surprising,
given the collapse in financial markets, nor is the reaction sympathetic. Quite the opposite.

JP Morgan recently laid off 2,000 people, real people, which is to say the list included mergers and acquisitions bankers, not simply the support staff and expendable brokers whom securities houses typically cull in bad times. The comment? It was as if, Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, the Mafia was laying off capos after six straight quarters in which earnings had not lived up to the dons’ expectations.

The average American has lost more, as a proportion of their net wealth, and certainly more innocently. And the focus of blame has moved on from corrupt corporate executives -- there just aren't enough of them -- to the system itself of Wall Street, of which the investment bankers are emblematic. Redundancies are their just desserts.

Personally, I take less pleasure in the humbling of the investment bankers. I have too many friends among them. But it was always a mystery to me why they were paid quite so much more than people of equal ability, if not the appetite for such a soul-destroying environment.

Oh, I know all the arguments. The securities industry is a winner-takes-all market, like the movie industry, in which it is worthwhile for companies to reward lavishly their best talent, because the best talent wins all the business. And there were the crumbs, an explanation borrowed from Bonfire of the Vanities, in which the hero explains to his daughter how brokers take discreet crumbs, but of gargantuan loaves.

Neither made much sense, so there is a curious efficient-market satisfaction in seeing bonuses fall for those still in work. Financial historians remind us that the brokerage industry was no more glitzy than accounting, up until the 1980s. Believe that the capitalist system should reward real economic activity, you cannot help but rejoice that investment banking is returning to earth.

On a less elevated level, no one is shedding tears, because investment bankers can still be insufferable. "Those still in employment are so used to bigging themselves up to colleagues and superiors, that they're unable to switch this off over dinner," says a friend who momentarily forgot her rule about dining with bankers. "They still suffer badly from busy-itis: I'm so busy, blah, blah, blah. Which is just dull."

Finally, investment bankers are hardly -- yet -- feeling sorry for themselves. Those made redundant typically receive 3-6 months of salary in severance, plus a sum related to their previous year's bonus. And they are still spending money as though they could walk into an equally lucrative job any time they wished.

Upscale New York nightclubs such as Lotus and Suite 16 are doing robust business -- on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights. There's no work the next day. And the members of the 405 Club are not worried. Their running joke: paying lavish meals at Craft and other Downtown restaurants with their $405 unemployment cheques.

So why should anyone else care? For a start, the young bankers are deluded if they think they can walk into another job. Their expectations are way too high for mainstream corporations, and financial skills are simply not all that relevant to the boring operational grind of most businesses. The unemployed bankers all talk about getting into private equity, but that is a small sector, and it already looks as over-crowded as was the securities industry in the late 1990s.

Investment bankers may still be living well, off their severance packages, but the reckoning remains ahead. Think of them as dotcommers, but with more expensive lifestyles, and a few more months before the Cristal budget runs out.

Most painfully of all, investment bankers have defined themselves by money. They may indeed be pleased to enjoy life after years of slaving over M&A contracts, and they always intended to quit banking while they were still young enough to write that book, or become a windsurfing instructor in the Caribbean.

Rubbish: almost no one gives up banking voluntarily; most of them have not a clue what to do next; and status, at least in the milieu of Kensington, Upper East Side Manhattan and the Hamptons, is largely dependent on last year's bonus.

On the Manhattan dating scene, the investment banker, the boring boyfriend par excellence, has one redeeming quality: he picks up the tab. "Now the money's gone, and you're left with nothing," says one young Wall Street professional.

Investment bankers may have enriched themselves on the misplaced savings of ordinary Americans, they may still be rich, and they may be out downing bottles of Cristal at Lotus at 3am on a Monday night. But have a little pity: they sold their souls to the devil, long ago; and the devil, like the market, has welshed on his side of the deal.