Here's an interesting snippet from the New York Times daily business newsletter.
Wall Street firms' bloodletting has killed more jobs in the last two years than any other comparable period in history. According to a report by the Securities Industry Association, 80,400 jobs -- or 10 percent of the total -- were lost between April 2001 and February 2003. In sheer size, the number of layoffs sets a record, the SIA said.
This strikes me as just another example of how the market pendulum is swinging violently. There is no question that the Internet bubble resulted in an astonishing and disproportionate stock run-up. But I think that there is equally no question that the reaction to the bubble has been a disproportionate depression of the stock market. And just as Wall Street's reaction to the bubble was to hire, hire, hire... its reaction to the correction has been to fire, fire, fire.
I look forward to the normalization of the market. Not because I feel sorry for all those Harvard B-School grads with no big firm to join. But rather, because only with a stable public market that rationally embraces companies that demonstrate product and sales leadership will exits appear more predictable and will start-ups find it easier to raise capital at all stages of their growth.
Someone told me this weekend that there are a lot of companies in a hire-fire-hire cycle. That is to say that, to keep the college donations up, they hire graduates, but to keep payrolls, they lay off the previous year's hires.
Posted by: Hasan Diwan | 05/12/2003 at 08:21 AM