Posted on 01/19/2015 6:15:07 AM PST by SeekAndFind
There’s blood on the Street.
In a wild swing of the ax that has shocked many pundits, Wall Street’s biggest banks have slashed nearly 50,000 jobs, and bonuses and expense money are being cut as profit opportunities dry up.
And there’s no easy way out, analysts say, because the Fed’s quantitative easing that once rescued the financial system with trillions of cheap dollars is — at least for now — history.
But while some analysts were unnerved by the carnage announced by banks last week during their earnings calls, the warning signs were there before — from lower trading and commodities revenues to currency risks and long-term interest rates that have trended lower.
The fourth quarter saw thousands more workers fired. Total reductions for 2014 were about 20,000 at Brian Moynihan’s Bank of America; 10,000 at Citigroup led by Michael Corbat; and 10,000 at Jaime Dimon’s JP Morgan. Morgan Stanley reports on Tuesday.
Many job losses were already flagged — attributed, for example, to a decline in servicing of delinquent loans as banks cleared troubled mortgages. But analysts also see brutal cost-cutting.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
LOL. It's true!
“World Needs Ditchdiggers.”
Hey, I don’t need the competition
IIRC Nixon let the Penn Central fail in the seventies because of managerial and union incompetence. In the twenty-first century Washington rewards managerial and union incompetence because our government, elected and bureaucratic, promotes both.
Not that I know of, the Penn Square debacle went on a tad before First’s although the underlying cause was bad energy loans mostly. Also, Penn Square was frankly run as a criminal enterprise.
I think Penn Square BANK came a good decade after Nixon....it was a bank declared insolvent in 82. On Penn Central, you would be correct.
The Commercial banks (as opposed to Investment banks) had and implicit duty of conservative stewardship of deposits - later made a legal duty by regulators and insurance by FDIC.
When Phil Gramm talked congress into giving investment banks access to trillions of dollars of insured deposits, the result was predictable.
All our banking deposits were turned over to “People who make a living f******g around with other peoples money” - who promptly gambled (lost) with the funds.
Quantitative easing = Trap Door
This central planning fantasyland has to stop. The market will clear itself, if the cronies and their politicians would just get out of the way.
Why won't somebody use the Commerce Clause to break through the logjam?
Many people had more than a scintilla of an idea.
But when Gov't is pushing subprimes and the public is behind it what are banks to do? Do you think they enjoyed having to issue loans which they knew would never be paid pack? No wonder they were tossing around to each other to get rid of them.
It is the activists like Obama who led Bank of America sit ins in Chicago to FORCE them to issue loans to inner city hobos who are guilty. Don't get sucked into the anti bank anti capitalist rhetoric. It is that which caused the Depression to go on for over a decade and which caused the escalation of bogus social programs.
Penn Central ....... a rail road.
I was referring to penn square BANK, not the railroad in my first post on the subject.
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