Wall Street Rats and The Mystery behind Bankers Suicide

#WallStreet Rats and The Mystery behind Bankers #Suicide

Wall Street traders: like rats in a granary

Has the problem been fixed?

"Wall Street now is better than it was but the majority of what was wrong has not been fixed. I agree with Michael Lewis that the Volcker Rule needs to have a lot more teeth. Take the rapid trading by the computer geniuses with their algorithms: those people have all the social utility of a bunch of rats admitted to a granary. I never would have allowed the rats to get in the granary.

"I don't want the brilliant young men of America dawdling away their lives in someone else's granary. It's not my idea of the right way to run the Republic. If you let me write the laws it wouldn't happen. I wouldn't allow the system to be that way at all. I wouldn't allow people to make money out of short term trading. I might have Tobin taxes. If we changed the incentives, a lot of this regrettable behavior would go away.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/05/08/berkshire-hathaway-wall-street-rats-in-a-granary/

BANKING ISN’T A WONDERFUL LIFE NOW AS SUICIDES SWEEP FINANCIAL DISTRICT

From The New York Post:

In the last two months, there has been a rash of suicides and mysterious deaths sweeping the world of high finance.

JPMorgan has been hardest hit, with three untimely deaths in just the last few weeks, and last week Autumn Radtke (left), a 28-year-old CEO of First Meta, a small cyber-currency exchange, jumped to her death in Singapore.

Historically, suicide rates rise during times of financial stress and economic downturns. Now, though stocks are at or near all-time highs, for many Wall Street bankers these are times of setbacks and stress.

Today’s bankers are not a settled, comfortable bunch anymore. A day doesn’t go by where you don’t hear about more bank layoffs and branch closings.

Under Jamie Dimon’s leadership, JPMorgan has announced 17,000 job cuts through the end of this year, and that’s on top of all the cuts from the 2008-09 crisis.

If you’re a banker today, many who once looked up to you as a success now think you’re evil; maybe you’re even the type who caused the economy to crumble.

On top of that, you hear politicians from the president on down blaming “Wall Street and bankers” for the crisis, as if they were all the same, when in reality it was only five or six individuals very high up at places like Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. who share responsibility.

Financially, many of today’s bankers, if not on unemployment, are making far less — as much as half or one-third less — than they did just four or five years ago. And that’s not easy for anyone, especially when you have a mortgage of your own, a family and a car or two.

For example, overall average compensation at JPMorgan was $122,653 in 2013. That amount is nothing to sneeze at, but it is still a lot less than the bankers were making before — often for a 60-to 80-hour work week.

When we lose a person like Autumn Radtke — who worked for Apple and directly for Richard Branson and became CEO of her own startup — from a 25-story apartment building because she can’t see the worth of living, the world loses.

And today many Wall Street bankers are in the midst of their own emotional and economic crises.