"It is the Great Depression on Wall Street. It sure isn't on Main Street," Ken Griffin, chief executive of hedge fund Citadel Investment Group, said during a panel at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California.
According to Griffin and other top U.S. investors at the conference, the credit and housing crises that led to hundreds of billions of dollars in losses for Wall Street firms will take those investment banks years to claw back from.
"Until you see Wall Street put on their party hats again and get on the tables and start dancing is going to be years," said Ken Moelis, a former UBS banker who now runs his own investment firm, Moelis & Company.
"It will be a long time for Wall Street to come back to where it was." Leon Black, billionaire investor and founding partner of hedge fund Apollo Advisors, said the banking system has been "broken" since last summer and has fostered a credit crisis "the likes of which I've never seen in the 30 years I've been in the business."