As I try to understand all that is going on in our country, one thing stands out to me and that is that there is incredible distaste for anything "Wall Street". While I am totally in agreement with how greedy and excessive some of the practices in that sector are, I also know another side of "Wall Street". . . .
At 11, my husband came to this country from Cuba(legally I might add) with only the clothes that he owned. His father worked in a factory designing and building machinery to manufacture folders being paid a 'pittance' of what he was worth. He bought a home for his family and sent his children to school. My husband went to a community college for one year before he asked me to marry him at 19. Shocked, I said 'how can we get married, you don't have a job'? After 40 years, this statement still makes us laugh. Long story (which will eventually be posted separately) short, he went out the next day, 'pounding the pavement', as we would say, and by week's end landed a job as a runner on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. From there, within a month, he was asked to join a small Stock Brokerage firm (Lockwood Peck) and was given the opportunity to learn the business.
He moved up rapidly, working for a few different firms (Eastman Dillon, Lehman Bros., Becker Securities and others, until in 1977 he started working for Bear Stearns in a new department that was being formed. He and another co-worker worked to get what eventually became the Global Clearing operation at Bear Stearns running. This area became Bear's most lucrative asset. While he did very well monetarily compared to our families who had struggled to provide for us, he never made millions, he never got huge (by Wall Street standards) bonuses, and he never got the promotions and recognition that he deserved. He would get calls at 2:00AM with problems and questions and he was the 'go to' guy for everyone who needed to cover their butts. He got up at 4:00AM to travel into NYC and got home after 7:00PM at night. Once, he helped a friend get a position because he knew that this person needed a job, when in all likelihood he could have applied and gotten that job himself. His 'friend' never looked back and never gave him a hand up, even though he came to him for answers he should have had but did not. He retired a multi-millionaire. My husband was once told by this friend, when he refused to stay in NY overnight because of a snow storm (he chose to be home with me and our daughters), that he envied my husband because he never kissed butt. True, we came first, so he did very well, but never as well as he could have if he'd played political games or set aside his priorities for gain. His belief was that God is our Provider and he never worried about what was 'fair'.
We have been blessed in many ways but to my point - in early 2008, after we had planned our retirement and gotten incredibly close to our goals, we discussed retirement at 62 (only two years from now), which would have been a dream for us. Then in March, our financial world took a tumble - Bear Stearns stock fell like a lead ball, and the NY Fed (Timothy Geithner), let JPMorgan 'buy' Bear Stearns for $2.00 a share (later renegotiated to $10.00 a share). To our shock, the multiple thousands of shares of Bear Stearns stock that we had was now converted to JPM shares valued at about $10,000. My husband was offered a "retention bonus" (stay-pay, another dirty word bandied around) to continue in his position as a Managing Director through the completion of the JPM transition at the end of 2008. His "stay pay/retention bonus" was not millions, not even hundreds of thousands; it was double pay for 9 months with a reasonable severance package due to his 31 years with Bear Stearns. All in all, we lost 70% of our retirement funds and are starting over from a much different place than we expected to be at age 60, but again, God is our Provider. All indications are that there will continue to be massive lay-offs from this financial sector of the work force but without the benefits that we were blessed to receive. People like my husband, who worked 10-14 hours a day under severe stress and commuted sometimes up to 3 or 4 hours a day for a future for their families, will be out of work with no place to go.
As for our future - we are resourceful and will survive this mess. At 60, my husband has started a new career working in our younger daughter's business. So, again, we are blessed, but when Bear Stearns went under (they called it a bailout but it was more like a rape), 10,000 people like my husband were left without jobs, many of them too old to get new jobs and like us starting over as far as their retirement was concerned. All the emphasis in the news seems to be on the excesses; but no one talks about the 'average' Wall Streeter who made an average Wall Street salary and suffered huge losses just like all of Main Street.
I am saddened by a friend of my husband's who told him that he was going to get a job at ToysRUs after he left Bear Stearns. Now that the economy has gotten so much worse, he probably won't even be able to get that job.
Wall Street is not a dirty word, it is a street in New York City where many normal, hard-working men and women gave a good part of their lives so that they could do what everyone else tries to do - provide a stable income for themselves and their families. The class warfare that has been exhibited is dangerous. It pits people with the same goals and values against each other just because they are in different sectors of industry and make more or less money based on that industry and what they are willing to sacrifice. This negative attitude pours over into our schools and even our churches, putting distance between people who have far more in common than they know.
What makes my husband, a man dedicated to his wife and children, working hard to provide for them for the last 42 years, any different from any other man doing the same for his family? The answer lies in the direction that he chose; the risks he was willing to take; the hours he was willing to work; the location of his place of employment, and perhaps something as simple as a BUSINESS SUIT!!!
