Without Wall Street employment, where is Hoboken RE.ality?

Wall Street Work Force Falls to 16-Year Low
Reuters - Apr 16, 2010

NEW YORK - Wall Street shed 1,200 jobs in March, in a third straight month of job cuts that pushed employment in New York City's key banking and investment industry to its lowest level since October 1993, the New York state Department of Labor said on Thursday.

The city's jobless rate managed to edge down in March, easing 0.02 percentage point to 10 percent, while the state's jobless rate fell the same amount to 8.6 percent, the Labor Department said.

Total employment on Wall Street, New York City's most important industry, fell to 156,000 in March from February, James Brown, an analyst with the state's Department of Labor, said by telephone. Employment in the city's banking and securities industry in October 1993 had been at 155,000.

Wall Street employment had peaked in December 2000 at 200,300 jobs.

Wall Street is the bedrock industry for both New York City and New York state.

Securities and commodities companies generate about 12 percent of the city's taxes. Those companies account for 15 percent of the state's tax collections, down from 20 percent before the credit crunch, state officials say.

Brown said the three-month string of declines may reflect the end of severance payments, because workers are not counted as unemployed until their severance runs out.

"It's reasonable to assume that at least some of it is people coming off severance," Brown said, noting companies often time layoffs for the end or beginning of a year.

In the previous downturn, Wall Street bottomed out with a headcount of 159,000 in April 2003, Brown said.

Despite the job losses on Wall Street, banks and credit intermediation companies added 500 jobs, perhaps driven by the rise in refinancings and debt work-outs, Brown said. (Reporting by Joan Gralla; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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