October 14th stories:
Wall Street On Track To Award Record Pay: Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007, according to an analysis of securities filings for the first half of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end by The Wall Street Journal.
Still on the Job, but at Half the Pay: ...now pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression... The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track pay cuts, but it suggests they are reflected in the steep decline of another statistic: total weekly pay for production workers, pilots among them, representing 80 percent of the work force. That index has fallen for nine consecutive months, an unprecedented string over the 44 years the bureau has calculated weekly pay, capturing the large number of people out of work, those working fewer hours and those whose wages have been cut... Even senior captains on legacy airlines rarely earn above $200,000 today, as they often did in the past. Mr. Lawlor says pilots’ pay these days fails to recognize the training and skill involved in transporting passengers even more safely than in the past.
The Years of Magical Thinking: Goodman, a national economics correspondent for The New York Times, doesn’t go so far as to match literary characters with real-life figures, but clearly the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan would be his Peter Pan: the fantastical flying boy who wouldn’t grow up to confront the adult world, where his theory of pristine, self-correcting markets simply doesn’t work the way he wishes it would. If Greenspan is Peter, then his band of Lost Boys who live with him in Neverland would include the current Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, and the chief White House economic adviser, Lawrence Summers. Unless our Lost Boys imitate their literary counterparts and return to the gravity-bound world, we could face further rounds of economic disaster... Greenspan, in one of history’s most galling now-you-tell-us moments, confessed last October that his magical thinking had turned out to be false. Thankfully, he’s gone from the public stage. Bernanke and Summers remain in positions of tremendous influence, and they have failed, so far, to articulate specifically just how wrong Greenspan was, and how they intend to reshape the worlds of banking and financial regulation... Goodman’s book reminds us that this situation contains the seeds of future fiascoes.
NYC's September Unemployment Rate: 10.3%: ...New York, even as it's losing the luster of Wall Street, taxes small businesses the way California taxes millionaires.
That dynamic is manifest in Manhattan's new monoculture. Gone, on their way out or being pushed to smaller, confined spaces are the flower district, the fur district, the garment center, the meatpacking district and the famed Fulton Fish Market. Even the diamond district is being nudged out of its 47th Street storefronts and into a city-subsidized new office tower.
The hollowed out city as "luxury product"—as Mr. Bloomberg once described his vision for a New York in which the wealthy subsidize the city's work force—is unsustainable...
No comments:
Post a Comment