Wall Street Is Hiring

A propos of a comment I made to an earlier post here this morning, apparently Wall Street is hiring:

While much of the country remains fixated on the bleak employment picture, hiring is beginning to pick up in the place that led the economy into recession — Wall Street.

The shift underscores the remarkable recovery of the biggest banks and brokerage firms since Washington rescued them in the fall of 2008, and follows the huge rebound in profits for members of the New York Stock Exchange, which totaled $61.4 billion in 2009, the most ever. Since employment bottomed out in February, New York securities firms have added nearly 2,000 jobs, a trend that is also playing out nationwide at financial companies, commodity contract traders and investment firms.

The financial sector accounted for 6% of GDP in 2006, an historic high. There have been findings there there is an optimal size for the financial sector of an economy, the size is independent of the state of the economy and does not vary over the business cycle, and, if the financial sector grows beyond that optimal size, it has adverse consequences for aggregate output, investment, consumption, growth rates, and social welfare. By some reckonings (cited above) the present size of the financial sector remains about twice its optimum size.

It’s amazing how much more you’ll get of something when you throw a couple of trillion dollars worth of borrowed money at it.