State comptroller Tom DiNapoli has a new report on Wall Street out, and it isn’t pretty.
One piece of information shows just how New York — City and State — grew dangerously dependent on an ever-growing Wall Street over the past three decades.
In 1981, before Wall Street took off relative to the rest of the national economy, each securities-industry job in New York City paid twice as much as the city’s average private-sector job outside of finance.
Last year, each securities job paid five point five times the average private-sector job.
In that light, the news that Wall Street has lost 4,100 jobs in 2011 (so far) and may lose 10,000 more by the end of next year is grim. Because these jobs pay so well, each job loss in the industry means two job losses elsewhere in the city.
The job losses are also bad news for New York City’s budget. The comptroller notes that next year’s budget gap — already pegged at $4.6 billion, or 10.7 percent of expected tax revenues — will widen, as “Wall Street-related tax collections [likely] will fall short” of the target.
Mayor Bloomberg’s habit of talking up Wall Street won’t talk up the industry’s revenues. Wall Street must deal with its own failures as well as the past, current, and future failures of its regulators.
The mayor has got to push city spending down in line with the new reality.
You may also like
NY leans on a volatile Wall Street
The stock market turmoil of the last week is a reminder of why it's risky, verging on foolhardy, for New York's state government to depend as heavily as it does on high-income households and Wall Street investors.
In the current fiscal year, taxes paid by the highest-earning 1 percent of New York taxpayers—including commuters to jobs in the state—are expected to generate 43 percent of personal income tax receipts, which in turn translates into 27 percent of total state taxes. Read More
Our goose is cooked
Wall Street, the goose that laid golden eggs for New York’s public sector for more than 25 years before the Great Recession, is “still working through the fallout from the financial crisis,” as Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli reported earlier this week... Read More
Profits down but bonuses up on Wall Street
Is Wall Street roaring back — as a revenue-generating force for New York’s insatiable state and city governments, that is? You might get that impression from glancing at today’s press release from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli... Read More
Dow down = state revenues up?
The prices of some previously high-flying stocks such as Apple recently have been plummeting, and the stock market has just suffered “its worst week of declines in five months,” the Wall Street Journal reports. This is not good news for savers and investors — but it may be causing sighs of relief in some corners of the state Capitol. Read More
Counting the goose’s golden eggs
The Wall Street bonus pool for 2012 expanded by 8 percent, but remains well below the peak levels of a few years ago, according to a release today by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Read More
Profits down but bonuses up on Wall Street
Is Wall Street roaring back — as a revenue-generating force for New York’s insatiable state and city governments, that is? You might get that impression from glancing at today’s press release from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, which headlines the finding that the average bonus for securities industry employees in New York “grew by 15 percent to $164,530 in 2013, which is the largest average bonus since the 2008 financial crisis, and the third highest on record.” Read More
No Wall Street bailout (of New York) this year
The latest mergers & acquisitions figures are out, and they're not pretty.
According to mergermarket, an M&A data watcher, the year's global slowdown is not only continuing but accelerating. New York can hang on to a thread of good news only in that its rate of decline is not accelerating. Read More
The Fed’s escape from NY (someday)
The national housing crisis is over.***
New York should worry. Read More