Bureaucracy May Be Ready For 'Smart People'

Robert, some 13 federal agencies (including both the OCC and the FDIC) sent HR staff or hiring managers to man tables at an all-day job fair in New York last month, sponsored by the New York Society of Security Analysts. NYSSA approached all these entities by spotlighting its value as a conduit for hiring Wall Streeters (past and present). See
this story.

The list of participating agencies can be found here: http://www.nyssa.org/AM/Tem...

Also, here's an item you might find of interest, on a related topic, "overqualification" (although not in the context of government employment).

--Jon Jacobs, eFinancialCareers News staff

I was a bank examiner for two years in the 1990s before getting a PhD and working on Wall Street for 10 years. I recently applied to the FDIC for a widely advertised midcareer bank examiner role, with supposedly over a hundred openings nationwide. The FDIC's job description asked for at least one year experience as a bank examiner or a PhD. Having both those qualifications plus Wall Street experience, one would naturally think I would be a strong candidate. I told some of my old bank examiner colleagues that I was re-applying and they told me they'd get a desk ready for as soon as HQ aproved my hire. Turns out I got rejected by FDIC HR in the preliminary stages. When I asked for clarification, they said my examiner experience was stale and my Wall Street experience was irrelevant. But what about the PhD? I asked, since that was a minimum qualification for the job all by itself. I received no reply.

The FDIC is just one of many agencies, but I don't think it wants anything to do with ex Wall Streeters. The OCC isn't even hiring right now.

Steve,

The second problem you mention - big pay disparities between regulators (including banks' own in-house compliance staffs) and the traders they regulate - has attracted attention here on eFC and elsewhere. See this story:

Wild Idea: Pay Regulators Well (Feb 9 2009)
"The government is stupid. Nobody with any brains is in that operation. They only make 30 grand, if that."
So declared 1980s insider-trading scandal figure Dennis Levine of Drexel Burnham Lambert, as famously recounted in James B. Stewart's 1991 book, Den of Thieves. ....

--Jon Jacobs, eFinancialCareers News staff

You will remember that there was a massive failure by the banking regulators. I am a former senior bank regulator and I spent many years in the investment banking world involved in risk management, risk reporting and risk technology. If I may let me offer the following comments:

1. The bank regulators had the authority to examine any aspect of a bank¹s activities. They had the authority to figure out what was going on at the banks and to limit it. The regulators did nothing. So hiring additional analysts will mean nothing if the regulators cannot or will not do their jobs.

2. Sending a regulator who makes $75,000 dollars a year to examine the activities of sophisticated financial traders who make millions of dollars a year is not a fair battle. And if you have ever worked in a government agency, as I did for over 4 years, you will be intimately familiar with the viciousness of the turf battles among the senior officials. There is a lot of deadwood at the top of the agencies and it needs to be cleaned out. A Herculean task if there ever was one.

I think "dumbing down" can happen in private industry too because the stakes are much higher and someone who is conscientious could be trouble in a lack of ethics commercial environment.