Just realized this is a 2007 graph. Here’s a 2008 layoff picture.

The Financial services industry employs about 867,400 people (directly) in the US. This is according to SIFMA (securities industry association).

From the beginning of the credit crisis (March 2007) starting with smaller layoffs and then Countrywide and Citi, there have been a total of 111,201 layoffs or 12%.

Challenger now predicts job losses to hit about 251,000 workers or 28%.

Of the 111,201 jobs lost, only 7800 or 7% of displaced have landed new jobs.

So where to look for jobs?

1. Wealth management and retirement services – businesses with long time
horizons – are strong possibilities, as are private equity firms

2. Back in the ’80s, Wall Street had a lot of smallish specialist firms like boutique broker-traders.

3. Uncle Sam may be hiring, too. (See Chart above).

4. The consulting business is eager to take on investment banker. (See Chart above)

5. Your best bet, though, might be to look beyond U.S. borders. “We’re
seeing tremendous demand for banking and finance expertise in Dubai,
and also in every Asian country except Japan.”

Trust the super optimistic Silicon Valley folks to talk about Web 3.0 as the next big thing, even before Web 2.0 is dead. Oh well, expect more cliches and also many companies changing their positioning to be “relevant advertising” ready. Color me skeptic.

The Way of the Future: Semantic Advertising

Successful advertising means showing the right product to the right
person at the right time. The semantic Web puts data into semantic
formats on the fly, and targets ads based on the meaning of data with a
high degree of accuracy.

The sub $1100 market for laptop is larger than the over $1100, which from the graphic below is what Apple’s going after with their new product announcement.

I can only think of the Classmates, OLPC and NComputing under the $200 range, which is going to be the leader going forward in terms of numbers.

Thanks to Larry for the graphic.

Why not have some fun while you’re at it.

1. Home Mortgage: Negotiate with your mortgage lender, they will definitely be more willing to listen now if you have been paying on time. The key is to prepare in advance. Go to BankRate and look up the best possible rates for your size of loan now. Renegotiate your loan with no points, no closing costs and nothing added to your new loan.

2. Home Insurance. Talk to your broker. Since the value of your home has fallen about 30-40% (most likely), you can shop around for a lower rate.

3. Food: Reconsider your coffee in the morning at Starbucks and look at new ways to spice up your home made coffee.

4. Food: Brown bag your lunch and setup a meeting every day with another coworker and eat out in the sun.

5. Reduce watering your lawn (both # of days and amount of time) to save on your water bill.

6. Cut your cable bill: With YouTube offering full length CBS, Hulu doing the same for NBC and the Daily Show already online, you can effectively eliminate your Cable or Digital cable.

7. Carpool or take the muni – no brainer. If you must drive, use the cheapest gasoline – its not that much different, regadless of what the Oil and car companies tell you.

8. Cut your cell phone plan to the minimum and make most calls with friends on Skype.

9. Eliminate your land line phone and along with it, voice mail or other services that your phone company has been charging for but you never use.

10. Shop around for lowest plan on Internet. Its 14.99 at Sunnyvale for the cheapest plan. If you have a broadband connection that offers metered access, check your usage and tier down to the lowest plan.

11. Consider home-made gifts for toddlers and kids if you have to attend a lot of parties for other kids.

12. Go Bald – its less expensive on shampoo, uses less water during bathing and you save time.

13. Replace your old car with a new scooter or trade in your SUV for a bike.

14. Try vacationing at your backyard.

15. Drain your swimming pool of the water, and use it as a basketball or tennis court.

If politicians were trains.

Actually my son would take offense to Sarah Palin being compared to Thomas the tank engine. But hey.

I have read close to about 1200+ articles, blog posts, news stories and
analysis on the mortgage meltdown. I think these are the best set of
slides you will get to understand the root of the problem. It does not
give any recommendations, but is a very objective view of the numbers
behind the mess.

Read about it.

Money quote
“The proposal would yield a net saving of $1 trillion by 2030 and slash
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 48 percent, according to Google, which
said it had been busy “crunching the numbers.”

The Telegraph has an amazing set of World maps. There are 18 in total. Two are very telling.

Wealth of nations in 1 AD

And wealth of nations in 2015 AD

Amazing.

I saw the new Google Blog Search with Meme tracking this morning. I
actually like it. Very simple way to view the top news and items that
are bubbling up in the world of blogs.

A meme tracker or news aggregator takes a list of sources and tells you what’s being discussed
(top topics) and who’s talking about it (top blogs, news sites etc.)

Its
a cleaner interface than techmeme.com Techmeme, much more open about its sources and
also more obvious as to why some news made it to the top versus others.

This
brings up another point in the technology space. One of being “open”. I
understand companies desire to protect their intellectual assets, but
if you look at Apple, they get away with pretty much being a very
closed and proprietary system. No call for being open about which
applications will get approved by them to be listed on their iPhone
store.

Same for techmeme (which also tracks & aggregates
news). Its pretty clear no one knows how or why some items make it to
the top of the new sites. Lots of people have suggested its because of
traffic, most # of times, first post etc., only to find them all being
a “part” of the reason why.

Should they all not be more open about the process? How come they get a hall pass?

From David Finbarr. Here are the top 3 that are a must read:

1)  The Financialization of America
A broad overview of how 1) insanely profitable Wall St. became in the
past two decades and 2)  this profitability was due to implicit
government subsidization of risk.  This includes the “too big to fail
policy” and the “Greenspan put”.

2) How regulation breeds complex financial products and Why Lax Regulation Did Not Cause the Crisis
by Mindles Dreck.  The author works in the investment banking
industry.  He relates how the industry had actually seen a dramatic
increase in regulation as a result of Enron and the Patriot Act.  But
the effect of regulation was not to make finance less risky, but rather
regulations encouraged the creation of more complex financial products
that outsmarted the regulators and gamed the system.

3) How the Fed lowered the reserve ratio and caused a decade of inflation and asset booms
– In 1995 the Federal reserve created special exemptions allowing banks
to keep 0% reserves in many cases.  This lead to an explosion of the
broad money supply, and successive bubbles in the stock market and
housing market.