To some extent it's already true. There's a lot of Perl in the financial sector. That community is paying a lot more than the average for Perl dev's already :-)
Considering the number of folk dealing with COBOL systems I bumped into at GOTO Copenhagen last week, and the number of COBOL jobs that pop up after a quick google I would beg to differ.
I can, of course, understand why you would really want it to be dead ;-)
I'm quite surprised actually! I've not seen COBOL in the finance sector (at least in the UK) for about 5-6 years.
Perhaps there still are a few corners where there are some rotting corpses hacking away on AS/400s which are actually gluing everything together!
I remember getting to sledgehammer the crap out of our AS/400 platforms and incinerate two entire pallets of IBM manuals - was "a great day for freedom" to paraphrase Pink Floyd.