It's about time. There are more stupid people in the hedge fund business pushing lame investment ideas now than there were stupid people pushing lame net ideas during the tech boom. I can still picture that idiot pitching CDO's about a 18 months ago. It sounded just like the idiots pitching selling 60 lb bags of dog food over the internet.
The problem is that the tech guys werent going to cause the global banking system to collapse. The HFs can.
MarketNewsInternational.com 3/25/2008 08:20:05AM US INDUSTRY NEWS TRADER DAILY reports ML to begin more layoffs of perhaps 300 bankers and says the firm "is preparing another major write-down" of perhaps as high as $8b.
Booming? They have been getting fired by the thousands in Cal. Maybe tens of thousands. Irvine is practically a ghost town now. It was ground zero for national mortgage companies, half of which are either now gone or a shell of their former selves. Think Countrywide. I agree these jobs won't effect the Street much, but that industry is hurting BIG TIME.
Come along now, back to the ward. We really need to do something about this multiple personality disorder Mr Day(793).
Here is a piece from a USA today article from some time last year showing 40,000 job losses in the mortgage industry. It is worse now. This took me about ten seconds to find as there are so many such articles. Mortgage job losses surpass 40,000 Posted 215d ago | Comments54 | Recommend8 E-mail | Save | Print | Subscribe to stories like this CHARLOTTE (AP) â At the North Carolina offices of mortgage lender HomeBanc Corp., Archie Clark is the only employee left. But in a few days, he'll be gone, too. When Clark finishes helping movers from the company's Atlanta headquarters collect computers and other property, he'll join the more than 25,000 workers nationwide who have lost jobs in the financial services industry since the beginning of the month â with more than half coming since last Friday. With few exceptions, the cuts are the direct result of woes in the nation's housing market. More layoffs are announced daily. On Wednesday, Lehman Bros. (LEH) closed its "subprime" mortgage business, laying off 1,200 workers at 23 offices; Scottsdale, Ariz.-based 1st National Bank closed its wholesale mortgage unit and cut 541 jobs, and Accredited Home Lenders added 1,600 positions to the heap. The night before, banking giant HSBC (HBC) said it would close a main financing office and cut 600 jobs. Since the start of the year, more than 40,000 workers have lost their jobs at mortgage lending institutions, according to recent company layoff announcements and data complied by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. Meanwhile, construction companies have announced nearly 20,000 job cuts this year, while the National Association of Realtors expects membership rolls to decline this year for the first time in a decade.