Earlier this year, I did a blog entry slating the business schools for helping create the market meltdown.
The Women on the Web site followed up with a brilliant roll call of MBAs, or Masters of the Business Apocalypse, from Harvard. The rogue’s gallery includes former Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal and his successor John Thain, bank bail out master Henry Paulson, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission Christopher Cox, former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines and his successor Daniel Mudd and of course, everyone’s favorite and the wort President in US history, George W Bush.
Now Ray Soifer from Soifer Consulting, as reported in the New York Times DealBook , has put together an index showing the fewer numbers of MBAs flocking to Wall Street is actually good for the market. According to the Index, if more than 30% of Harvard MBAs end up in “market-sensitive jobs” like investment banking, private equity and hedge funds, it’s a long-term sell signal. If that number is below 10%, it is a long-term buy signal. According to Soifer, the Harvard MBA index has historically produced more “sell” signals with strong results in 1987, 2000-02, and 2005-08. In fact, the last time it reached the 10% “buy” level was in the early 1980s, when the Dow Jones industrial average traded below 1000.
And with only 28% of Harvard MBAs this year going into market sensitive careers, it’s a good signal to start buying.
The Soifer index seems odd, It is the fraction of MBAs graduating each year who end up in Wall St key jobs, not, as I would have expected, the fraction of Wall St key jobs held by MBAs