Nation’s Top Bankers Seek Retraining, Jobs, New Skills

More than 4,000 suddenly unemployed Wall Street bankers and traders were shuttled by fleets of stretch limousines to job fairs, unemployment offices, and retraining centers, hoping to find work, now that their careers in the financial markets are over.

“We have no skills,” Manny Johnson, a former broker for Shearson Lehman Merrill Goldman told a hastily assembled Stamford, Connecticut news conference. “We’d work for food, if only we knew how.”

The crisis on Wall Street, leading to the collapse of some of the top brokerage houses and investment banks, created a new class of unemployed and “admittedly unemployable” workers seeking jobs at a time when unemployment is already skyrocketing.

“We’re not the likeliest candidates to get jobs right now,” Johnson admitted. “We can’t do any real work, aside from look at computer screens and buy and sell, or repackage mortgages to each other.

“We can’t type, we can’t do construction, we can’t do landscaping or anything outside, and we can’t cook or clean,” Johnson said. “We’re used to ordering people around, earning millions every year, and playing a lot of golf. If anybody has a need for people with that skill set, we’re available.”

Johnson told reporters that “bankers were suddenly understanding the plight of the people our mergers and acquisitions, and offshoring jobs to Asia, had destroyed. Okay, now we get it. We’re sorry. Doesn’t anybody have a corner office with a great view of the Statue of Liberty that needs to be filled? Some of us would even work for, say, half a million a year, if the bonus structure were right.”

The bankers and brokers were “used to a certain amount of fluidity in our careers,” Johnson said. “I mean, every once in a while, some of us would move from one house to another. But you never had a situation like this, where a whole bunch of our employers collapsed at once.”

Johnson said that in the absence of a federal bailout not just of banks but of the bankers who “admittedly all but destroyed the banking system,” bankers would rely on “trickle-up economics,” in which the working poor would create job opportunities for the formerly incredibly wealthy.

“It’s getting to the point,” Johnson said, “that many of us are updating that old Depression song to ‘Buddy, can you spare a $10 million loan? We’ve got balloon payments coming due on our houses. Some of us may even have to leave our country clubs. Oh, the humanity.”