You've heard of Webcasts and Podcasts...welcome to Cubecasts. From our cubicle to yours, here is Issue #5 of The Weekly Oasis, a newsletter in which Bankerella shares her views on market events, financial news, and things of interest to everyone from gorillas to prospective monkeys.
Close door, open window.
It's a perennial rule of Wall Street that if there's blood in the streets, somebody's making the most of it. As the job toll from the credit crunch rises to 40,000, companies like Pimco are stepping into the gap in the hopes of picking up the sort of skilled candidates that, until recently, were hard to lure away from big banks. And they're not the only ones: according to several of our recruiter acquaintances, smaller firms are casting broader nets in the hopes of catching some of the outbound talent. If you're affected, it's a great time to ask yourself not just "Must I bank?" but also, "What do I really want to do?" Since many firms are (paradoxically) more accessible now than a year ago, it might be a good time to check out niches of the industry you've wondered about but never pursued. Got jobs? Need a job? Visit us at http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/jobs.
Fire sale at the Federal Reserve.
On Wednesday the Fed cut rates by another quarter point to 2% -- lower than they've been since 2004. Year-to-date, prime rate cuts have been bigger and faster than they have for decades. The market response was initially enthusiastic but flagged by day's end on concerns that this cut would be the last for a while. The Fed's language hinted that more cuts might not be needed, but unfortunately it sounded to much of the market like more cuts might not be possible. And that's a fair concern. Bernanke's (and our) problem is that money can't get much cheaper without causing a slew of undesirable effects, so at a certain point we can't rely on the Fed for stimulus any longer.
Hot thread this week on WallStreetOasis: Taking breaks at work.
You do it, we do it, everybody does it. Find out what your fellow monkeys do at work to decompress, relax, or just wait for senior guys to get their acts together. Sure, you could check your comps for the fourth time, or try to fix that annoying pixel problem on the last graph in the 80-page book that nobody's even going to crack at the meeting. But have you ever wondered what the guy in the next cube is doing with his downtime? Check it out on WSO. And here are two words of wisdom to live by, fellow cube-monkeys: Alt-Tab. Do it early, do it often.
Questions? Comments? Send an e-mail to Bankerella@WallStreetOasis.com or send a private message to her at WallStreetOasis.com
You can read previous issues of The Weekly Oasis here: Previous Issues.
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