the finance industry / wall street

5300 people * $50k per annum is $250MM.

Supposedly (according to the informational memo WF "helpfully" provided employees about this crisis) WF goes through 100k branch employees a year. I'm not sure how that was intended to reassure.. Branch employees (tellers, personal bankers, even sales managers) get treated like crap and not paid a living wage, yes, but that's an even larger issue than the small amount of people that were fired in connection with this.

I'm not even convinced that all of those layoffs were really due to "bad acting" tbh, given that their MO is to fire people after like two months if they don't meet their sales targets.

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/the-cost-of-a-financial-transactions-tax-to-retirement-funds

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz recently introduced a bill proposing a 0.1 percent tax on financial transactions. This means that when people trade a share of stock or a bond, they would pay a tax rate of 0.1 percent ($1 on $1,000), on their trades. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this tax can raise more than $80 billion a year in revenue, somewhat more than the entire annual budget for the food stamp program.

Not surprisingly, the financial industry doesn’t like the idea. It has argued that this tax would be a big hit to retirees and pension funds. While it is understandable that the industry would try to raise such fears to protect its profits, its claims have little basis in reality, as a bit of arithmetic can quickly show.

um yeah, pension funds and individual 401k holders are probably the least active traders. Not to mention that transaction costs are at all-time lows as it is.

it's free money to the tune of $80B/year and our political system is so in hock to finance that it won't pick the money up off the ground

https://www.trashberg.com/p/i-think-i-found-jamie-dimons-secret

Jamie Dimon is so boring his secret social media accounts aren’t even horny.

Matt Levine in top form today on the Archegos report:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-29/archegos-was-too-busy-for-margin-calls

Everything in the report is like this. This report is not a bunch of lawyers identifying a bunch of problems and characterizing them, in hindsight, as 'red flags.' Everyone saw all the problems here, evaluated them reasonably, came up with sensible solutions and then didn’t do them.