I use the word work somewhat loosely. My summer-associate class had been flown in for orientation the previous spring, only to spend the day in the lobby of the training room, watching the NASDAQ plunge 300 points. By the time we reported for duty in mid-June, the tech-heavy index had lost about 1,300 points from its March peak of 5,132. Before the crash, eager recruiters had told us that Merrill Lynch’s bankers would be okay no matter what; in the bull market, they had done initial public offerings, or IPOs, and in a bear market, they would do mergers and acquisitions and stock repurchases instead. This prognosis turned out to be as delusional as the Pets.com prospectus. The office was a well-upholstered tomb. We spent most of our days—and nights—performing a kind of kabuki, pretending to do work for bosses who must have known that they had no work for us to do. Yet still the dinners, the trips, and the lavish paychecks continued.

Why? The question was resolved for me during an August cocktail hour at P. J. Clarke’s, the financial district’s version of a meat market. There another associate pointed out, a trifle owlishly, the explanation: “Seven percent.”

That was where a new analysis had pegged the average “gross spread,” or fees, on an IPO, which was the only kind of live deal I had worked that summer. To be sure, Merrill Lynch was splitting those fees with other banks. But when offerings ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars, as they easily did, a few percent was a lot of money. Sure, a competent bookkeeper or legal secretary could have done most of our work. But in the banks’ fees, our salaries were a rounding error.

Still, why not compete down our salaries, if they could? I’m sure that if David Poor and his fellow managers had hired M.B.A.s from Georgetown and Notre Dame instead of Harvard and Chicago, they could have found something to do with the money saved.

These days, that question seems more pertinent, and more mysterious, than ever. With laid-off bankers flooding the job market, you would think that salaries in finance at long last would come down. But even a coven of angry Congress members seems to have had only a limited effect on what the financial industry is willing to pay its employees. Hearings and diatribes have succeeded merely in forcing firms to pay more compensation as salaries rather than as bonuses—as if the main issue with lavish paydays at bailed-out banks were the timing of the checks.

To understand why banker pay seems so persistently outlandish, consider another industry that skims off the top of a vast well of cash: the business of making movie trailers.

Unless you’re deaf, or have been living in an ashram for the past four decades, you’ve heard the voice of Don LaFontaine, known in the trailer industry as “the voice of God.” LaFontaine’s gravelly baritone popularized the phrase In a world where … and seduced us into movie after movie, from Dr. Strangelove to The Simpsons Movie. When he died last year, at the age of 68, one obituary reported that at his peak, LaFontaine was making $30 million a year voicing trailers and commercials.