Wall Street Jobs Crashed With Market

His friends thought Jasper Connolly had it all. A promising career at a large California company. An MBA from the right school. A happy marriage with a talented wife.

And the capstone: a shot at the big time; a new job on Wall Street.

That was a year ago. Today, Connolly is back in California and unemployed. Worse, he is beginning to think he is unemployable.

Connolly is a victim of Black Monday. Shown the door just days after the Oct. 19 stock market crash, he has since discovered that, despite his MBA, his corporate experience and his year in New York, he can’t find work--on or off Wall Street.

That jobs here are hard to find is understandable: The securities industry already has idled about 15,000 people, and there is talk among employment experts that another 10,000 may be out of work here before the blood bath ends.

Connolly--whose name has been changed in this story to avoid further damage to his job prospects--understood those odds. And not being the typically incorrigible Wall Streeter, he traded in his Wall Street dream of important work and big bucks sooner than most in order to beat the rush and find a job elsewhere.

He wasn’t prepared for the grim reality. Hundreds of applicants are lined up in front of him for every financial services job he has applied for in California. And when he tries to capitalize on his corporate background--a rare combination on Wall Street--he is shunned.

“They make it crystal clear that my resume has been tainted by my time on ‘greedy’ Wall Street,” Connolly said.

His story is a poignant reminder that the upheaval on Wall Street isn’t just a temporary disruption for tens of thousands of high-paid workers.

Rather, it is the first stage of what some observers are calling a worldwide structural overhaul of the financial services industry.

Although the vortex of the turmoil is in New York--where the great bulk of the nation’s securities business is--and in London, analysts say Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago are beginning to feel the spillover effects. And before the shakeout is over, many predict, this will be as broad and traumatic a reordering as America’s farmers and oil and gas workers have faced.

“We saw the same thing with agriculture and energy--people having to move on to other things,” said Windle B. Priem, who heads the financial services group at the Korn/Ferry International executive search firm.

“A lot of these (Wall Street) professionals being laid off are having a hard time going back home to Cleveland, but they’re going. And we’re seeing kids in business schools already deciding that, when they get out, they’ll do what they were trained to do--be general managers at big companies instead of transactors on Wall Street.”

Priem says the post-crash turmoil “makes the last big round of layoffs on Wall Street (in 1973 and 1974) look like a (mere) downturn” and predicts that “there’s definitely going to be major structural changes throughout the financial services industry.”

Nine Banks Interviewing

His predictions weren’t nearly as dire two months ago. At that time, most Wall Street analysts were still counting on commercial banks, insurance companies and other financial services firms to court the best of the laid-off workers.

In fact, nine commercial banks--those that have applied to do securities work in the event that the Glass-Steagall Act separating the powers of commercial banks and investment banks is repealed--are interviewing laid-off Wall Streeters and have made a smattering of hirings.

A few Japanese banks and small regional securities firms--those that trade securities only for clients, not for their own accounts, and thus weren’t as hurt by the crash--also have hired some workers idled by major brokerages.

“We have been besieged by people looking for jobs,” said an analyst for Nikko Securities in New York.

And some large investment firms have made a place for workers fired by competing firms by using the crash as an excuse to let their own mediocre workers go.

Secretaries, telecommunications experts and others who lend support services to Wall Street also have found the job hunt somewhat easier, because their skills are more transferable than are those of bond traders, deal makers and so-called back office workers, who handle stock transactions.

Overall, executive search firms say their efforts on behalf of idled Wall Street professionals have been sobering.

With the exception of the commercial banks with deep pockets--Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Security Pacific, Morgan Guaranty and Bankers Trust are most frequently mentioned--the nation’s banks and insurance companies seem to have so many problems of their own, executive searchers say, that it now seems unlikely they will be able to seize this opportunity.

“The banks are not rushing after these people wholesale. They’re trying to cherry pick,” said Emanuel Monogenis, who heads the financial services practice for the Heidrick & Struggles executive search firm.

Nor do big corporations seem to want these laid-off workers. It isn’t the stigma of being fired that major industrial and service companies find troubling; it’s Wall Streeters’ high income expectations and reputations for having high opinions of themselves.

“A lot of them were lured to Wall Street for the money,” said Korn/Ferry’s Priem. “In two or three years, you were making what it took somebody climbing the ladder at Ford Motor 15 years to get. That just won’t be reasonable to expect any more.”

BankAtlantic Financial Corp., for one, says it won’t hire anyone accustomed to Wall Street’s “totally unrealistic” pay: $75,000 to $80,000 for a trader or investment banker fresh from business school and upwards of $250,000 after two or three years on the job.

“I’ve been rejected (by big corporations) six times, and they have all said the same thing: They’re afraid I’ll never be happy with them because the money is so much less than I’m used to,” said a fired Kidder, Peabody & Co. trader.

Connolly also points out that, in his year in New York, he discovered that many Wall Street advisers “have such a bad opinion of businessmen; they were always saying they would never work at any industrial company.” This deprecating attitude, he believes, has come back to haunt many out-of-work Wall Streeters.

Small companies are another matter. Executive searchers said they have been most successful placing fired Wall Streeters with small, entrepreneurial companies whose more freewheeling styles and creative compensation structures more closely match those of Wall Street brokerages.

“Remember that the best of the best went to the Street,” Priem said, “so small companies are happy to get them.”

Still others have gravitated toward real estate sales, car sales and investor relations. And some of the highest-paid professionals left without jobs are toying with starting their own businesses.

Heidrick & Struggles, for one, tries to steer them clear of that notion. “I hear a lot of these people saying they want to form a business, and I tell them all it’s a pretty risky thing for deal makers to do,” Monogenis said. “They’re steeped in an environment of deep resources, and they’re unaccustomed to the discipline of a new, small company.”

Even unemployed, many Wall Streeters still exhibit a lack of discipline, Monogenis said.

“They’re saving on nickels and dimes, but they’re still spending the dollars,” he said. “They’re so bloody young that they’re resilient, I guess.”

Perhaps because Wall Street is populated by optimists, or possibly because of predictions that as many as 10,000 more Wall Street traders, bankers and corporate finance specialists face layoffs if profits don’t pick up in the first half, a surprisingly large number of the laid-off workers who spoke to The Times--all on the condition that they not be identified--remain hopeful of finding work and finding it in New York.

“I was one of the first to go, and there are sure more jobs open now than there will be three or four months from now when the next round goes,” said a 35-year-old laid-off investment banker. “It’s difficult but not impossible to get in to see people (about a job), and actually, I’ve found people a little more receptive the last couple of weeks because they have their budgets for the year now and they have a better idea of which way their business is going.”

His optimism also springs from the continued strength of mergers and acquisitions activity in the aftermath of the crash--a business requiring skills akin to his corporate finance expertise.

Interest “is starting to pick up a little bit” for traders as well, said a 33-year-old former bond trader who was fired last year after the municipal bond market collapse. Even though she has been out of work for four months, she remains hopeful of landing a comparable job, figuring she can find one in Chicago if not in New York.

$61,800 Average Salary

The most depressing part of job hunting on Wall Street at the moment, she said, is that “the money they’re offering now has been really, really low. People think they can get you for 30% or even 50% less than you were making. I already turned down one job because of the money.”

Some older Wall Streeters who have lost their jobs--generally those in the 40 to 45 age bracket--few older than that have been let go in this young person’s business--find that they have little choice but to turn down offers of low-paying jobs or part-time work because they lose their higher severance pay once they take a job of any sort.

In New York, the average brokerage industry job pays $61,800--nearly three times the average state wage of $22,700. And, since most firms are offering fired workers between one week and one month of severance pay--at their departing salary level--for each year of employment at the firm, many can’t afford to take a lower-paying job.

“Many of my (laid-off) friends with families are truly downtrodden right now,” said the 33-year-old former bond trader. “They can’t afford to take a part-time job, which is all they’re being offered. So these people who are used to such a frantic pace (on Wall Street trading floors) are sitting around doing nothing but worrying about paying bills and feeling betrayed.”

Isolation is another problem. “We all feel that we’re in competition with each other for jobs, so you just avoid contact,” said a 27-year-old laid-off investment banker. “It’s fine to talk to people who are still employed, but who’s still employed?”

‘Head Spinning’

For Connolly, there is also the fear that nothing will live up to Wall Street’s importance.

“When I got out of business school, I wanted to go to Wall Street--not so much for the money as for the chance to do big and important things,” he said. “Where else can you do things with Wall Street’s impact?”

But the trauma of Black Monday is something he gladly will live without.

“We held each other’s hands all day long,” he said of his colleagues, “and the next day, I called my wife and said, ‘Cancel our plans to Florida for the weekend, honey; the world’s changed.’ ”

Less than two weeks later, rumors of wholesale layoffs swept the firm. Soon after, he was gone.

The fear of not finding work didn’t set in right away. He had been thinking of jumping ship anyway and had two interviews lined up for that fateful week.

He made the mistake of keeping the appointments.

“I was in no shape to be there,” Connolly said. “My head was spinning around like a top. I blew it.”

As the interview opportunities dried up, Connolly fell to questioning his worth to society.

“Suddenly, all of your expectations are gone,” he said. “There’s a void. It’s not like I’m a machinist or an auto worker. I can’t just sit it out until the next cycle (when the market turns back up). On Wall Street, that could be three to five years.

“We all know we’re very intelligent and very highly skilled. But face it, who really needs to know how to write a prospectus? Corporate finance just comes back to buying low and selling high. That’s the bottom line. And you don’t have to pay somebody a lot of money to get that kind of advice.”

Money was never his chief motivator. But now, Connolly finds himself obsessed with the question of money.

“I don’t know what I’m worth any more,” he frets. “I don’t have any frame of reference. It all went away with the crash.

“My buddies and I used to go out for a beer after work, and we’d be so smug talking about how good we were and what big money we were making. Once in a while, I’d add a little sobriety to the conversation.

“This one guy would say, ‘I could go work at a small company as an analyst or planner when I get tired of this,’ and I’d say, ‘Sure, you’re eminently qualified. But a small company can buy somebody for $28,000 to do what we do for $80,000.’ ”

In a more philosophical mood still, Connolly compares Wall Street’s latest crop of layoffs to the men who lost it all in the Gold Rush.

“The gold miners came to California in their Conestoga wagons hoping to make some money and go home to their wives and kids. But, on the whole, they failed and stayed behind as disillusioned, bitter men,” he said.

“We’re no different. Instead of getting in our Conestoga wagons, we went to business school. All we wanted to do was save our bonuses for two or three years and go back home.”

Times researcher Eileen V. Quigley, in New York, contributed to this story.