THE NEW YORK TIMES: While much of the country remains fixated on the bleak employment picture, hiring is beginning to pick up in the place that led the economy into recession — Wall Street.
The shift underscores the remarkable recovery of the biggest banks and brokerage firms since Washington rescued them in the fall of 2008, and follows the huge rebound in profits for members of the New York Stock Exchange, which totaled $61.4 billion in 2009, the most ever. Since employment bottomed out in February, New York securities firms have added nearly 2,000 jobs, a trend that is also playing out nationwide at financial companies, commodity contract traders and investment firms.
Though the figures are small in comparison to overall Wall Street employment, executives, economists and headhunters say they expect the growth to pick up steam in the coming months.
“I think we’re seeing some hiring in anticipation of better times,” said Rae Rosen, a regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “Wall Street typically hires in anticipation of the recovery, and there is a sense that the economy has bottomed out and is slowly improving.”
The increase in hiring and cautious optimism stand in sharp contrast to the mood among workers in other fields, where jobs have been slow to return or are disappearing altogether. Since June 2008 the number of jobs has shrunk by nearly 14 percent in manufacturing and by 22 percent in construction, but only by 8.5 percent in the financial industry nationwide.
It is also the opposite of what is going in other highly paid, white-collar professions like law, where employment nationwide in June was the lowest since late 2001, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Continue reading and comment >>> Nelson D. Schwartz | Saturday, July 10, 2010
