I am not often at a loss for words, but when I found out that New York is going to spend our tax dollars to retrain investment bankers for some kind of useful work, I was speechless. In total, New York will spend $45 million in government money to retrain investment bankers, traders and others who have lost jobs on Wall Street, as well as provide seed capital and office space for new businesses those laid-off bankers might create.
This raises so many questions: Why does an unemployed investment banker need any taxpayer money? Don't retired investment bankers already have tens of millions of dollars stored up? What kind of work could an investment banker be trained to do that someone would pay for? And if so, that other job would pay so much less than investment banking why would a former investment banker would take the job?
To these questions, my answers would be he or she doesn't; Yes; Nothing I can think of; No reason at all. If it wasn't bad enough that Wall Street investment bankers got billions in bonuses from TARP, now they are getting money to retrain them to do something else? Haven't they gotten enough of a government bailout? I am sure that there are people in need who could benefit far more from that $45 million.
The only thing I can think of that makes sense about this story is that it was supposed to run on April 1st and it somehow got printed six weeks too early.
Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College. His eighth book is You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-19-2009 @ 6:09AM
al coholic said...
They don't need any retraining. They are already qualified to be politicians.
2-19-2009 @ 8:31AM
David said...
What could you possibly to do retrain an individual who worked for years lying, cheating and stealing from others. They are useless outside of Wall Street or Washington, DC.