God Bless Mike the mayor, New York the city and the state of New York.
With all those talents... paradise of crooks
Welcome to those Asian bankers... begging..
New York to Retrain Wall Streeters
nytimes.com.
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Published: February 18, 2009
Just as Michigan is scrambling to retrain laid-off auto workers, New York City officials have come up with a plan to find new work for the unemployed of its core industry: investment banking.
Under a program Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled on Wednesday, the city wants to invest $45 million in government money to retrain investment bankers, traders and others who have lost jobs on Wall Street, as well as provide seed capital and office space for new businesses those laid-off bankers might create.
The plan is intended to stem the exodus of talent from the rapidly collapsing financial services industry, which has been the city’s economic engine for decades, and speed the industry’s recovery, which may take years, officials said.
City officials also plan to try to lure big banks and financial companies from Asia and other parts of the world to set up operations in New York, filling some of the void created by the implosion of large American firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. They hope to receive permission from the federal and state governments to use $30 million in federal money to attract those companies and other financial firms to Lower Manhattan.
Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement that he could not predict how the financial services sector would bounce back, but he said he was confident that it would.
“When it does, cities around the world will compete to capture the jobs it brings,” he said. “In New York City, we’re not waiting for that day to come. Instead, we are taking aggressive steps to put the city in the best position to capture growth, and we’re doing it by promoting one thing more than any other: innovation.”
It is unclear how much of the damage to Wall Street can be repaired with such a small investment by the city. Mr. Bloomberg’s own company, Bloomberg L.P., may be a model of the type of business the program could spawn, but he started out with $10 million of severance he had received when he was dismissed from his job at Salomon Brothers. The mayor was scheduled to announce the 11-part program at a building in SoHo that will house an incubator for startup companies that might employ laid-off professionals. A second business incubator is scheduled to open in the spring in Lower Manhattan, according to Seth W. Pinsky, the president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation.
The Economic Development Corporation plans to put $3 million into funds that would make small investments in startup companies, Mr. Pinsky said. He said that he hoped to attract twice as much money from private investors and that $9 million would be enough to help start hundreds of new businesses.
All told, city officials plan to spend about $15 million on the program, in addition to the $30 million of federal money. They estimate that over 10 years, it could stimulate the creation of at least 25,000 jobs and contribute $750 million to the local economy.
The plan underscores the Bloomberg administration’s acceptance that Wall Street will play a much smaller role in the city’s economy for years to come, and perhaps forever. City officials now expect that the city will lose 65,000 jobs in financial services during this recession and that it will take several years to recover a significant portion of them.
One of the biggest concerns is the shrinkage of the capital markets subsector, which contributed much of the profits the big banks reported during the last boom. Capital markets, which New York dominated, includes the selling and trading of stocks and debt, like the subprime mortgages that fueled the housing bubble.
City officials expect the number of jobs in capital markets to fall to about 100,000 this year from 131,000 in 2007. More important, they expect the city to gain back only about 4,000 of those high-paying jobs over the next five years.
“We have a substantial number of very talented people coming out of Wall Street,” Mr. Pinsky said. “Where do these people go? Do they stay in New York or go elsewhere?”
City officials admit that those people may feel less of a need to be in New York after this crisis. To counteract that notion, city officials are concentrating on retaining and developing New York’s financial infrastructure, like the New York Mercantile Exchange, and trying to rally the financial community around the idea of New York as a hothouse for entrepreneurs.
|
