With yesterday's terse mandate of sexy-business dumping (read between the lines), Citi has fired over 75,000 associates since 2007. The thought of that many bankers freed onto the shrinking landscape is unsettling (picture an upturned anthill), but consider also the implications exiting that many ancillary businesses has for the economy. Either bad things will happen, or the activities banks abandon will be assumed by others in a different way.
This reminds me of an Enron irony. Several years back before the bubble burst I had the occasion to break bread with an Enron executive at a supply-chain software conference. He gleefully described a new business that Enron was sinking development capital into: selling "weather insurance" to companies to hedge the impacts of adverse conditions to standard business cycles. So, for example, a ski resort could purchase a hedge to cover losses due to a late snow season. The exec also described an opportunistic secondary market for securitized weather hedges.
Great idea, huh? No wonder those guys dumped.
Needless to say, no one in the markets is insuring the weather today. Here's the WYSIWYG: whatever comes over the next 2 years or so as financial markets correct and evolve, all of us on the dole will vie for fewer traditional openings. We have to evolve our personas depending on which way the wind blows. There's no way to hedge that.