Meredith Whitney Sees A 10% Drop In Wall Street Headcount And “Dramatic” Declines In Payouts In 18 Months
by ilene - September 9th, 2010 3:09 am
Meredith Whitney Sees A 10% Drop In Wall Street Headcount And "Dramatic" Declines In Payouts In 18 Months
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
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And you were wondering why the SEC and certain politicians with extensive connections to the financial services lobby are starting to stir now that it is common knowledge that every single hedge fund and trading desk’s woes are a function of HFT run amok (which is exaggerated BS of course, but from Wall Street’s darling, HFT has now become the one thing everyone loves to hate, and blame their own underperformance on).
And as we suspected, there is a far more structural issue underlying the recent faux-move to restore confidence in markets, namely imminent pain for Wall Street headcounts… and bottom lines. According to Meredith Whitney, who had been relatively quite in recent weeks, Wall Street faces the departure of about 80,000 staffers, or 10% of all, within 18 months, not to mention a major drop in Wall Street compensation. The reason is the same as the one we pointed out earlier: slowing revenue growth, primarily due to the complete collapse in trading volumes, as computers have used their binary elbows to push everyone else out of the markets, and with Wall Street’s primary revenue model now being exclusively reliant on trading, this is equivalent to a partial extinction event as many trading firms will have to close. This also means that the New York City economy is facing another major solvency crisis as tax receipts are sure to plummet.
More from Bloomberg, citing Whitney:
“The key product drivers of Wall Street’s revenues and profits over the past decade have been in a structural decline over the past three years,” Whitney said in the report. “2010 marks the first year in many in which Wall Street-centric firms will go through structural changes.”
Barclays Plc, Credit Suisse Group AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc may lead a slowdown in hiring in Europe as the fixed-income trading boom fizzles out, recruiters said last month. Barclays Capital’s income from trading bonds and commodities fell 40 percent in the first half amid the sovereign debt crisis. Fixed-income, currencies and commodities trading was the biggest revenue contributor at investment banks from Deutsche Bank AG to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
While regulatory reform, including higher capital requirements, will force some of these shifts, there will
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William K. Black on ‘Financial Racketeering;’ Government Coverup; a 250% Tax Increase
by ilene - August 13th, 2010 4:05 pm
William K Black on ‘Financial Racketeering;’ Government Coverup; a 250% Tax Increase
Courtesy of JESSE’S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN
The interview with William K. Black starts at 13:00 in this video and is well worth seeing.
Gresham’s Dynamic: The least ethically inclined have an advantage in the US financial system (in which regulatory capture nullifies enforcement) driven by perverse incentives of oversized bonuses and the failure to investigate and prosecute criminal activity.
In addition to the overhang of unindicted and undeclared fraud that is still in place, distorting the clearing of the markets, there is the issue of an imbalanced economy in which an oversized financial sector exacts what amounts to a draconian tax on the real economy, that is, fees and tariffs and other unproductive drains in excess of anything that the government is levying.
What Do You Get for a 250% Tax Increase?
As I recall the percentage of financial sector profits to corporate profits recently peaked at 41%, from a long run average of less than 16%. Granted, this is a bit theoretical because of the pervasive accounting fraud in the banks and the corporations.
I wonder what the percentage of profit, pre-bonus, is being enjoyed now?
This can be viewed as a form of a tax. If the government raised taxes from 16% to 41% what do you think the impact on the US economy would be? And yet there is little discussion of this, or the racketeering that accompanied such a festival of looting.
Yet conceptually this is what has been accomplished through the deregulation of the banks and the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and of course, regulatory capture. The financial sector acts primarily as a capital accumulation and allocation system, and secondarily to facilitate wealth transferals through pure investment and speculation, the famous school of winners and losers. I would suggest that this latter function has grown out of control like a cancer, and metastasized to drain and debilitate the better part of the political system and the non-financial economy.
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I would suggest that this system is broken, and that there can be no sustainable recovery until it is fixed. How can confidence return when most of those in the know realize that the fraud is still in play? Who can take positions with confidence in such a corrupt…
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Why The Bankers, The Fed, and Their Allies In Washington Are Afraid of Elizabeth Warren
by ilene - August 11th, 2010 4:15 am
Why The Bankers, The Fed, and Their Allies In Washington Are Afraid of Elizabeth Warren
Courtesy of JESSE’S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN
“Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders."
Dr. Lawrence Britt
The Nation
The AIG Bailout Scandal
William Greider
August 6, 2010
The government’s $182 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG should be seen as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the financial crisis and its costly aftermath. The story of American International Group explains the larger catastrophe not because this was the biggest corporate bailout in history but because AIG’s collapse and subsequent rescue involved nearly all the critical elements, including delusion and deception. These financial dealings are monstrously complicated, but this account focuses on something mere mortals can understand—moral confusion in high places, and the failure of governing institutions to fulfill their obligations to the public.
Three governmental investigative bodies have now pored through the AIG wreckage and turned up disturbing facts—the House Committee on Oversight and Reform; the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which will make its report at year’s end; and the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), which issued its report on AIG in June.
The five-member COP, chaired by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, has produced the most devastating and comprehensive account so far. Unanimously adopted by its bipartisan members, it provides alarming insights that should be fodder for the larger debate many citizens long to hear—why Washington rushed to forgive the very interests that produced this mess, while innocent others were made to suffer the consequences. The Congressional panel’s critique helps explain why bankers and their Washington allies do not want Elizabeth Warren to chair the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The report concludes that the Federal Reserve Board’s intimate relations with the leading powers of Wall Street—the same banks that benefited most from the government’s massive bailout—influenced its strategic decisions on AIG. The panel accuses the Fed and the Treasury Department of brushing aside alternative approaches that would have saved tens of billions in public funds by making these same banks “share the pain.”
Bailing out AIG effectively meant rescuing Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America…
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Banks Don’t Intentionally Overcharge Credit Card Customers…Or Do They?
by ilene - October 3rd, 2009 2:48 pm
This is not sun-shiny news, but a few words of caution about your bank statement from Mr. Sunshine. - Ilene
Banks Don’t Intentionally Overcharge Credit Card Customers…Or Do They?
Courtesy of Mark Sunshine of The Sunshine Report
Have you ever tried to recalculate the finance charges on your credit card bill? I am betting that few American’s know if their bank is overcharging them or not.
I have to confess, for the last 28 years I was one of the people who trusted my bank and didn’t bother to check the interest calculation. After all, in 1966 when I opened my first bank account my mother told me that I could trust my bank and that they would never try to rip me off.
But, this month my wife (she is a lot more attentive to details than me) appeared at the door of my home office (where I was busy watching a football game) and demanded that I recalculate the interest on one of our credit card bills. Of course I didn’t want to do it. However, after a lot of spousal pushing (and during half time) I did what I was told. And, guess what? My wife was onto something. When I looked at the bill I was able to quickly confirm that we had been overcharged. The amount wasn’t much, $4.57, but then again, since we had a $0.00 balance subject to finance charges, $4.57 seemed like a lot.
On Monday my wife called our bank and they immediately admitted their error and reversed the charge. But, the overcharge on one credit card bill made me wonder; could we be getting overcharged on all our credit cards and how would we know?
So, I got the other credit card bills from my wife (she takes care of all of the finances in our family and pretty much everything else that is important). I discovered that despite paying the entire balance each month on our other cards we still were incurring finance charges. So, I read the rules on the back of the credit card bill. While I am a trained attorney, I haven’t practiced law in a while and am rusty in the arcane art of interpreting legal hieroglyphics. It took me a little while to decipher the credit card agreement and after working on it for about an hour I still wasn’t sure what it meant. My wife was much quicker (after all, she…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site