It's Hard Out There On Wall Street
Grab some tissue, you're going to need it:
Wall Street headhunter Michael Karp said he met last month over tea at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with a trader who made $500,000 last year at one of the six largest U.S. banks.
The trader, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate, complained that he has worked harder this year and will be paid less. The headhunter told him to stay put and collect his bonus.
“This is very demoralizing to people,” Karp said. “Especially young guys who have gone to college and wanted to come onto the Street, having dreams of becoming millionaires.”
Sadness, sadness everywhere:
Ilana Weinstein, CEO of search firm IDW Group LLC, said in an interview that she had nothing good to offer a trading executive in his early 40s who complained last month about morale at his bank, one of the six largest in the U.S.
“This is the first time that people don’t necessarily believe it will get better,” said Weinstein, whose Third Avenue office has two exits “like a high-end plastic surgeon” to assure discretion. “Compensation has been recalibrated.”
Ah, but at least we have an explanation:
“They’re not going to make the kind of money they wanted,” said William Hambrecht, chairman of San Francisco- based WR Hambrecht & Co., who designed the Dutch auction of Google Inc.’s 2004 initial public offering. “I’m not sure people really have come to terms with the fact that what we had was a financial bubble.”
And, they're fighting back, against regulation and the scorn:
That isn’t diminishing lobbying efforts to soften rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, which would reduce risk, curtail proprietary trading and force more transparency in the $601 trillion derivatives market. Large financial institutions have been “exceedingly aggressive at trying to roll back reform” and have largely succeeded, said Greenlight Capital Inc. President David Einhorn, 42, who bet against Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in the months before that firm’s collapse.
Leon Cooperman, the first Goldman Sachs Asset Management CEO and head of hedge fund Omega Advisors Inc. in New York, said Wall Street has been “excessively” blamed and President Barack Obama has “continued to project himself as anti-wealth, anti- business and socialist in his leanings.”
Phelan said he’s worried about “social unrest.”
“My taxes are going up,” he said. “Everybody hates me."
Continue reading at Bloomberg...
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Song - Jump You Fuckers - By Gene Burnett
This one pretty much speaks for itself.
- "Hey Mr. Wall Street on the 50th floor..."
Oct 12, 2011 at 6:46 PM
Reader Comments (12)
You gotta love it, when its Wall Street's turn to get a taste of their own medicine and suffer on the losing end of the economic trend they start up the whining like I've never heard before in the media. For decades we've watched first union workers then white collar workers lose jobs and income gains to the Wall Street machine. Now they have one potentially down year and its whine whine whine.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/11/elizabeth-warren-201111
"... At a time of record corporate profits, a time when 14 million Americans are out of work, when millions have lost their homes and, according to the Census Bureau, the ranks of those living in poverty has grown to one in six—that Elizabeth Warren could be publicly kneecapped and an agency devoted to protecting American consumers could come under such intense attack is, ultimately, the story about who holds power in America today.
When the C.F.P.B. was first proposed to Congress, in early 2009, the Chamber of Commerce, the leading business lobbying group in the country, announced that it would “spend whatever it takes” to defeat the agency. According to the Center for Public Integrity, from 2009 through the beginning of 2010, it would be one of the biggest spenders among the more than 850 businesses and trade groups that together paid lobbyists $1.3 billion to fight financial reform…
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2010 the financial industry flooded Congress with 2,565 lobbyists. They were financed by the likes of the Financial Services Roundtable, which, according to the Center, paid lobbyists $7.5 million, and is on its way to spending as much or more this year. The Chamber of Commerce spent $132 million on lobbying Washington in 2010. The American Bankers Association spent $7.8 million. As for individual banks: JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in TARP funds from taxpayers, spent nearly $14 million on lobbying during the 2009–10 election cycle; Goldman Sachs, which received more than $10 billion from taxpayers, spent $7.4 million; Citigroup, which was teetering on the brink of insolvency and received a $45 billion infusion, has paid more than $14 million to lobbyists since 2009. And none of this money includes the direct campaign donations these organizations, and their surrogates, made to members of Congress.
The banks “do not like to lose,” says Ed Mierzwinski, of the National Association of State Public Interest Research Groups, which was part of the grossly outmatched consumer coalition that managed to scrape together a paltry $2 million to lobby in favor of reform…"
Sorry again for eating up virtual real estate. But it's important. (via Balloon Juice)
Very well said.
I saw the Liz Warren story earlier. It's in line to be posted. Thanks.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/living-beyond-our-means-3-charts-that-prove-that-we-are-in-the-biggest-debt-bubble-in-the-history-of-the-world
Always best to post links whether you think I've seen them or not.
this is a joke article , right?
http://uneasymoney.com/2011/10/10/is-the-fed-breaking-the-law/
(h/t amicus Jesse @ http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/)
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/david-brooks-occupy-wall-street-101311
*well, he is
Always best to post links whether you think I've seen them or not.
Yea, DB gets out maby 4-5 times a year and we need to cover his back wile hes out being a real person with a life after "The Daily Bail"..............!