‘I Want You,’ Uncle Sam Says to Unemployed Wall Street Analysts

By Josh Fineman

April 8 (Bloomberg) -- Uncle Sam to Wall Street: I want you.

Underscoring Washington’s appeal as the financial industry shrinks, about 400 finance professionals have signed up for a New York job fair this month featuring nine federal agencies ranging from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s double the tally at similar events last year, organizers say.

Attendees at the April 24 event will include Virginia Donner, 43, who called a friend at the Federal Reserve after losing her job at a hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut. “When you’re looking for work and your industry has kind of imploded, you have to look at what your skills are and then figure out who’s hiring,” she said.

The job-seekers are among 23,300 people who lost industry work in New York in the year through February as banks worldwide announced almost $870 billion in losses and writedowns. The credit crisis that claimed Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co. and Bear Stearns Cos. may cost another 23,000 jobs over the next year, New York City estimates.

Unemployed Wall Streeters “are sick of the insecurity,” said William Drawbridge, director of marketing and development at the New York Society of Security Analysts, which is organizing the job fair. “Government jobs are stable jobs. This is a good out for them.”

‘Phenomenal Opportunity’

The SEC, criticized in recent months for having too many lawyers and not enough analysts as it failed to unearth Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, is in the market, according to Chairman Mary Schapiro.

“We have a phenomenal opportunity right now to bring in much more current and useful skill sets, with people who have lost jobs on Wall Street and are anxious to do something, and do something very constructive,” Schapiro told Congress during a March 11 hearing.

Granted, the government pays less than the banking industry, where associates with three years on the job can earn as much as $120,000 a year, according to Alvin Kressler, executive director of the analysts’ association. About 40 percent of the group’s members earn between $175,000 and $190,000 a year.

A government employee in New York can earn between $76,000 and $153,000, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s Web site. In Washington, government salaries range from $59,000 to $127,000.

Pay Cuts?

“Nothing pays as well as Wall Street,” said Laura Richardson, 45, who lost her job as an analyst at BB&T Capital Markets in McLean, Virginia, two months ago. At the same time, “there are no long-term guarantees on Wall Street.”

Richardson said she’s considering making the trek to New York for the job fair to seek a government role, seeking a job “to help fix the problem.” She added that she’s ready to do “Whatever I can do to help prevent this from happening again.”

Other local jobs are becoming scarce. New York City had a record month-to-month increase in its unemployment rate in February, climbing to 8.1 percent from 6.9 percent in January, the state Labor Department said last month. The city’s jobless rate was the highest since October 2003, and the financial industry shed 2,700 jobs last month.

New York City will probably have lost 46,000 financial jobs by the second quarter of 2010 from the beginning of 2007, according to the city’s Office of Management and Budget.

“The government does provide some good benefits, a good health program,” said John Palguta, vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service. “If anybody is worried that the government may simply not be able to afford them, either they were making well over $200,000 a year or they’re wrong.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Josh Fineman in New York at jfineman@bloomberg.net