New York, July 11: 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 totalled $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 Mr 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 per cent in manufacturing and by 22 per cent in construction, but only by 8.5 per cent 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 Labour Statistics.
The financial work force in New York has shrunk by more than 28,000 since its peak in January 2008, but is still slightly above its level in 2003 after the tech bubble burst, meaning it actually weathered this recession — the worst since the Depression — better than the previous one. Nationally, staffing is back to where it was in late 2005, while employment in the overall economy is near 2004 levels. As hiring has picked up on Wall Street, salary packages recalling the boom years are reappearing at the most senior levels.
Mr Richard Stein, of Global Sage, an executive search firm, said corporate clients had offered compensation packages worth more than $1 million annually to 12 candidates in recent weeks. “The offers are not near like 2006, but there is still a war for talent,” he said.”
For the local economy, Wall Street’s rebound is a rare bit of good news. New York City is cutting services like day care and adult literacy programmes to help balance its budget, while Albany is facing a $9.2 billion deficit this year.
“These are jobs that bring a lot of money into the city and have an impact that is out of proportion to their number,” said Mr Carl Weisbrod, the president of Trinity Real Estate.