As we all know, a lot of jobs were lost in the recession that followed the market crash of 2008, and financial-services workers, especially, took it on the chin. The securities industry lost 79,000 jobs between June of 2008 and last month, 30,000 in New York alone. But Breaking Views today points out that it’s actually way less — 14,000 less — than the number of jobs lost after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.
Why? A lot of people have kept themselves employed cleaning up from the crash, either through underwriting bonds or exploiting the unstable market through trading, and are still raking in relatively awesome pay, despite the fact that they have to take a lot of it in stock, now. Overall, we suppose this is a good thing — especially for New York! — but it makes us kind of uneasy, since clearly, there are still quite a few people working in that sector that should be fired.
Relative success [Breaking Views]
