Imagine the city without them. Imagine cocky 22-year-olds not being drawn here like moths to the flame, not setting up camp in Hoboken, not boarding the path to become millionaires by way of the Merrill Lynch training program—not engaging in mating dances at Bungalow 8 or attending nightly services at Scores. And the older ones, the ones with families and tuitions: Picture them just leaving town. Imagine, this year or next, a mammoth real-estate sell-off, a market crash.

And imagine city coffers left unfilled by their tax dollars (Wall Street profits last year were just recalculated at $4.8 billion, $2 billion less than the city had thought). Imagine their problem becoming our problem.

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Three M.B.A.’s sit at a table. no one’s collected a paycheck in at least a year. “Renée has a completely blue-chip résumé,” says Michael, their career coach.

“Right. Blue-chip,” says Renée. She worked for McKinsey and Enron, enrolled in Stanford Business School, and then spent four years at a major investment bank before being laid off last spring. “I did okay for the first three months without a job,” she says. “But then it doubled. You think, ‘I’m very qualified, and I think I did a great interview, and I know the right people, and I sent the dang thank-you letter and dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. And why not me?’ ”

I ask Renée what skills she could bring to a non-investment-banking job. She lets out a sharp laugh.

“Michael,” she says, “what skills can I bring to a non-investment-banking job?”

“The ability to get the job done?” he says.

“‘Sometimes,’ says one unemployedbanker, ‘I think the worst thing that ever happened to me was being accepted by Harvard Business School.’”

“I’ve got a lot of skills,” she says. “I’m a smart person. I can do strategy, finance, I could probably figure out marketing if I had to.”

“You know,” offers Michael, “being smart is a skill.”

“Try getting a date in New York when you’re unemployed,” says John, an M.B.A. who worked in Telecom and venture capital and who’s been searching for a job since spring 2001. “I met somebody for drinks yesterday at the Royalton, and it was 72 bucks.”

“I worked downtown,” says Jill, laid off last year from a diversified financial-services company where she led a department of 50 people. “So I say all the time, ‘You know, I could be dead.’ But you know, I don’t know how I would have functioned had September 11 not happened.”

Michael turns to me. “These are people who’ve basically done everything right,” he says. “They’ve gone to good schools, taken the right jobs. And not passively, either—they took risks from time to time, they did entrepreneurial things. Then this recession made them ask if they even picked the right career in the first place.”

“Sometimes,” says John, “I think the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life was being accepted by Harvard Business School.”

Will, 33, executed M&A deals for ten years at three different major Wall Street firms. Now, for the first time, he’s living off his savings. “Somebody once told me investment bankers are either running to something or running from something,” he tells me. “I think it was some of both for me. But I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”

His apartment—a $1.2 million, 1,800-square-foot classic six on Park Avenue—has a variable-rate mortgage, so right now it’s $5,000 a month including maintenance. He and his wife and 3-year-old daughter have a Hamptons summer rental that costs them $20,000. His monthly nut is $12,000. “I know a dozen people who have two, three kids in the city who go to private schools and big mortgages, and they have more than two years without work,” he says. “The unfortunate reality for most of us is that it’s all we know how to do. People kind of get stuck in what they call the investment-banking ghetto.”

One day at the height of the boom, when Will was making upwards of $500,000, his bosses offered him what seemed like a sweet deal: a two-year salary guarantee and the option to borrow half his second-year bonus at 6.25 percent interest. How would he repay the loan? With next year’s bonus, of course. Living off the bonus had become an institution. Not risky but shrewd.

“Not everyone took the loan—they encouraged you to,” he says. “But at the time, some people thought the firm was positioning itself for a sale—to make sure people would stay on. You’re locked up because as part of these guarantees you’ve signed noncompetes.” Will used the loan to buy the Park Avenue apartment for the wife and daughter he barely saw. And soon enough, Will found his company had been acquired. “It was a disaster,” he says. “A big chunk of my group would get fired every two months. I knew it was a matter of time before they got rid of me.”

“Doesn’t this happen in M&A all the time?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. “And some people outside the bank world sort of thought we were getting a dose of our own medicine.”

On September 11, Will saw both planes hit from his office. A month later, to the day, he was laid off. “They told me they were gonna give me 60 percent of my guarantee. I had taken out a loan against the guarantee, and that wouldn’t be enough to repay the loan. But they still wanted the loan repaid.”

He hired a lawyer, who told him that while he had a strong case, it would take years and cost more than $100,000 to go through arbitration. But Will was still holding a card. “There was a $5 million deal, and I was the only one who could finish it.” He offered to stay on and close it if the company paid him the bonus. “They didn’t send me a check—they just said, ‘Okay, the loan’s been repaid.’ I didn’t see any cash that year. And in banking, you know, you only get paid once a year.”

When he talks about what happened, he has none of Arthur’s proud protestation. He’s angry. He feels taken in. “It gave me very good perspective on the lack of loyalty and security on Wall Street. I canceled countless vacations, was on planes for bullshit two-hour meetings on the West Coast. And at the end of the day, there’s no consideration.”

Once laid off, Will would spend five hours a day with his daughter. “I mean, I don’t know one senior-level person I worked with who has a healthy marriage. They don’t spend time with their families. You can tell they don’t want to. People are very quick to say, ‘Let’s have a call on the weekend,’ or ‘Let’s cancel vacations.’ Divorce rates are relatively high, although I think some bankers don’t want to get divorced because it would be so expensive. And you know, to be honest with you, I don’t know too many happy bankers. People aren’t happy.”