Courtesy of Pam Martens.
The lingering impact of the Wall Street crash of 2008 to 2010 has devastated the job market for young college grads. The government debt piled on to bail out Wall Street has killed the prospects for the next generation’s standard of living. Now, Wall Street is literally killing the next generation.
Moritz Erhardt, a 21-year old college intern working for the investment banking division of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, was found dead in his shower after working around the clock for three straight days at the U.S. bank’s offices in London, according to published reports from fellow interns who shared the premises.
Merrill Lynch, known on the street as “Mother Merrill,” wants you to know it is “deeply shocked and saddened.”
London newspapers are reporting that Erhardt had worked eight all-nighters in a two-week period in hopes of securing a permanent post at Merrill when he graduated. Summer internships in both London and New York for the largest Wall Street firms frequently consist of grueling100-hour work weeks, including Saturday and sometimes a half-day on Sunday. Based on hours worked versus compensation, interns are frequently making $15 an hour – the amount that fast food workers in America are demanding in a strike called for August 29.
A companion tragedy of this young man’s death is the grief and self-blaming his parents will be haunted with the remainder of their lives. These are very likely parents who boiled his baby bottles, put safety latches on the cabinets as the toddler took his first steps, diligently saved for his college education. But they didn’t realize they needed to question if turning their son over to the care and stewardship of one of the largest financial institutions in the world for a summer internship could lead to his death.
In 1996, I interviewed at Merrill Lynch in Garden City, New York. That was 12 years before what was then the largest retail brokerage firm went on a mortgage derivatives binge and collapsed into the arms of Bank of America. The branch manager led me from one office to another, which frequently had their doors open, pointing to each broker and stating: “This is my million dollar guy; this is my $900,000 guy, this is my $750,000 guy,” referring to the annual revenues the brokers produced for the firm. Fortunately, I was able to secure employment a few blocks down the street for another firm that introduced its employees by name.
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