Ideas matter enormously. Bad ideas can kill people, leave them in poverty and impede human progress. Good ideas can enrich humanity physically and spiritually.

Our human drive to work can only really be satisfied if we channel it into pursuits about which we feel strongly.

Magazine
Fall/Winter 1999

Tom Halverson '87
Executive Director, Credit, Goldman Sachs International

What 20th century event had the most significant event on your profession or field of study? What lesson do you take away from that event?

My profession is international finance and the 20th century event which has had the most significant impact on my profession would have to be the collapse of communism in 1989/90.

In reality the demise of the ideas underpinning socialist economic thought was a process rather than an event. But the dramatic events of 1989/90 demonstrated that the ideas of state ownership and control of the economy, with its accompanying political control, were finally discredited and bankrupt.

The explosion in financial services growth in the late 20th century and the economic activity which it serves signals the end of more than 100 years of ideological battle between the many disciples of Marx on the one hand, and believers in markets on the other.

The lesson I take from this is that ideas matter enormously. Bad ideas can kill people, leave them in poverty and impede human progress. Good ideas can enrich humanity physically and spiritually.

Personally, what is the most meaningful life lesson you have taken from your vocation or avocation?

The most meaningful lesson I have taken from my vocation is that our human drive to work can only really be satisfied if we channel it into pursuits about which we feel strongly. Success and personal satisfaction are most likely to be found in work which excites and challenges you: follow your interests and passions.

What person(s) or mentor(s) have had the most significant impact on your life? Can you describe how that person affected your life?

Outside of my family and friends, my most important mentors were the Wabash faculty and staff who taught and befriended me during my personally and intellectually challenging years at Wabash from 1983-1987. Those Wabash faculty who remain my friends, and some that have moved on, had a profoundly positive affect on my life by taking me into the Wabash community and helping me put my life on a trajectory which would never have been possible without Wabash and its people.

In your experience, what is the greatest misconception the public has about your vocation (or field of study) or the people in that vocation?

As an employee of an international investment bank I regularly experience public misconceptions of my vocation as a bastion of overpaid, overworked egomaniacs who don't actually make anything, but who nevertheless prosper by moving around the money and assets of others who do. Objects of fear and loathing that we often are, investment bankers are a key contributor to the immense efficiency of the U.S. economy, which matters tremendously to savers and borrowers alike. If the public were more aware of how wholesale investment banking directly and indirectly underpins the economy, public misperceptions would diminish, but not disappear.

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