Where did all the bankers from collapsed institutions go? | Hacker News Reader

Where did all the bankers from collapsed institutions go?

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80 pointscwan27 comments

I just want to note how delighted I am by these "data porn" posts that show up every once in a while. The last notable one I remember was OKCupid's analysis of communication success correlated with user photograph traits. Is there a site devoted to Tufteian data visualizations and analyses like this? I'd bookmark the hell out of its RSS feed.

I'm not sure we'll see many more of the OkCupid posts hit the front page. I think some sort of filter may have been added.

I recently submitted their latest: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1129738 and it got upvoted a lot in the first hour (more than others that did make the front page) but for some reason never made it to the front.

Which is a bit sad because I think it was their most interesting one yet. (And the visual aids were extremely well done.)

Really? The OKCupid posts were some of my favorite articles on HN in a while.

I wonder if it's you who is marked as a spammer somehow, as opposed to the OKCupid blog.

I can't imagine why someone would want to blacklist that site, but I could imagine HN's capricious, opaque, oft-changing spam filter could have nailed you personally for no reason at all.

http://flowingdata.com/ is a pretty nice blog about data visualization. Both for reposts and commentary of other sources, and some original content. Some of http://flowingdata.com/category/data-underload/ posts are pretty amusing.

Personally, I rely on http://chartporn.org/ for my daily dose of data visualization.

About: A collection of interesting charts, tables, maps, and interactive data toys -- with a focus on economics and graphic design. Enormous thanks to the bloggers who help find all this stuff, and the wonderful researchers, analysts, and graphic artists who create them.

As good as it looks, anyone that doesn't know it's the banks at the top of that image that collapsed (like, say, a european like myself) is going to be very confused by this chart.

It's explained in the text but for the graphic to more sense on it's own, some sort of arrows would've been nice.

I'm not sure if the graphic is just confusing, useless or both. They appear to say that BoA and Nomura benefited the most, followed by Barclay's. But the width of the lines to Barclay are the the biggest of all. As far as I can tell from the (very few) numbers they provided, these chart has no quantitative link back to the data.

I really hope I'm just missing something, otherwise this is sad coming from 'Data Scientists'.

Can anyone enlighten me?

I thought the same thing, but there isn't enough data to suggest that it's wrong. I think that there is a portion "unemployed" a portion "changed careers" and a portion that are too small to individually plot. So that entire graph may only be like 75% of those that were originally at those companies.

For me, BoA back to school. Technically BoA didn't fail, but I viewed the recession as time to go back and get graduate credentials. I am currently working on a MSFE.

So, this ask the question; Where did the people that caused the collapse go ?

Dude, they're still right where they were... running the show.

They stayed at Goldman.

They're still working in govt or are in Congress. Most of the ones whose terms are up are running for re-election. (Dodd, D-CT, is one of the few who are retiring.)

Many are still in office or got reelected.

Everywhere but Goldman, it appears.

If Goldman had wanted them they'd already be there.

Actually there were lay-offs at Goldman too.

"... Barclays was by far the biggest beneficiary, scooping up 10% of the laid off talent ..."

Barclays was also laying off (UK). Maybe it was strategic re-investment in the US.

Perhaps this pretty graphic is true for at most 15% of the 30000 people laid off from Bear Stearns and Lehman but it's certainly not true for the all 30000 people who were working at those banks because the headcount at the remaining banks has not risen accordingly. It's entirely possible that not everyone on the planet has a LinkedIn profile.

It's also likely that the "best" people at these companies (in terms of staying on top of their career, keeping contacts, etc.) are the ones using LinkedIn.

And that LinkedIn is the best data set there is on this matter, however sparse the data is.

Unlikely, from my experience people back office/middle office people are far more likely to use it than front office people. Which probably skews the data a lot. FO people are much more likely to use Reuters instant messaging or Bloomberg to keep in-touch, etc.

What's the movement from Bear Sterns to Merrill Lynch imply? It's the only one linking two failed entities..

Merrill Lynch still sort of exists, in the sense that people will still say they work there. They have officially rebranded to "Bank of America Merrill Lynch", but I imagine people that were originally hired by ML will still say they work for ML and keep their LinkedIn profiles updated accordingly. (I'm on the other side, and I tell people I work for the Bank of America rather than "Bank of America Merrill Lynch", because that's a mouthful, and frankly, not a very creative name.)

I'm not sure if this is correct - the only bits that kept the ML brand were the private wealth management and some parts of the non-US global markets division. Even then, officially the full name is still "Bank of America Merrill Lynch" and I think only a minority would keep their employer listed as "Merrill Lynch".

Merrill Lynch was not bought by BoA until September 2008 and the merger did not legally complete until December of the same year (followed by company-wide rebranding throughout 2009). So I think the flow on the graph shows those that were made redundant when Bear Stearns collapsed in March 2008 and then went on to employment with ML before the BoA merger, which happened nine months later.

EDIT: grammar.

FWIW, our email addresses did not change from "bankofamerica.com" to "baml.com"† until two weeks ago. If I used LinkedIn, this is the event that would prompt me to update my profile, rather than whatever press releases were issued.

(† Why yes, we do use YAML...)

Sipping cocktails on tropical beaches?

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