BANKING JOBS ON THE MOVE

Courtesy of Jim Hightower's blog:

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Let’s hear it for Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other Wall Street banks that are opening up tens of thousands of new, well-paying jobs for researchers and analysts!

Unfortunately, the jobs are in India, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe, with many also headed to China. These powerhouse bankers – who profit enormously from America’s people, laws, protections, and subsidies – no longer feel any responsibility for providing good American jobs. Indeed, they are likely to offshore some 40 percent of their research-related jobs, cutting about 200,000 U.S. employees this year alone.

Banks are not letting their executives talk to the media about this, hoping that We the People won’t notice that these high-quality positions for America’s college graduates have gone bye-bye. They even have euphemisms for their actions, saying that the cuts should not be called offshoring, but “reengineering” of their workforce.

Call it what they will, the demise of banking jobs is moving higher up the organizational charts, including upper-level executives in charge of product development, trading, and sales. The banking job trickle out of America has become a flood. So much so that outsourcing firms in India like to joke that the only role for top bankers in the U.S. will be to greet clients and shake hands when the deal is done. Only, it no longer seems to be a joke.

The Wall Street giants get foreign employees to whom they can pay a fraction of American salaries. But what does our society get? The products and services are not improved, nor are they cheaper – the labor savings are not passed on to customers, but pocketed by those at the top. It further widens the disparity between the very wealthy and the rest of us, weakening America’s economy and undermining our democratic ideals.

If Wall Street doesn’t give a damn about Americans, why should America be underwriting Wall Street? [Emphasis mine]

Hmmm, and they want the U.S. taxpayer to pay for off-shoring more U.S. jobs in addition to bailing out their profligate securities gambling?

I think not.

Another One Bites the Dust

Adios WaMu.

J.P. Morgan Chase has acquired WaMu for $1.9 bln (MSNBC.com). (Fire Sale Pricing!!! for assets of $310 bln)
(Bloomberg.com) (NYTime.com)

Wonder if they'll finally give me a non-usurious interest rate?

Sweden: Been There. Done That.

Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way

By CARTER DOUGHERTY

Published: September 22, 2008

A banking system in crisis after the collapse of a housing bubble. An economy hemorrhaging jobs. A market-oriented government struggling to stem the panic. Sound familiar?

Swedish National Debt Office Bo Lundgren, finance minister during the 1992 crisis.

It does to Sweden. The country was so far in the hole in 1992 — after years of imprudent regulation, short-sighted economic policy and the end of its property boom — that its banking system was, for all practical purposes, insolvent.

But Sweden took a different course than the one now being proposed by the United States Treasury. And Swedish officials say there are lessons from their own nightmare that Washington may be missing.

Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.

That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well.

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I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for this.

In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr. literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.

“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”

¡AYE! ¡Cajones grandes, Señora Pelos! ¡Brava!