Outsourcing is great.... until your job is the one going overseas

[neoteric lefty]

I wonder how all the financial associates and analysts would feel about sending jobs overseas if it were their jobs going over. What if Indonesia suddenly became a great source for financial and technical analysts in the next few years. I hope they are as happy to re-train in a different field if that should become a reality. These people need to understand that a free market won't solve all problems. These people are turning into FUNDAMENTALIST CAPITALISTS, and any fundie isn't a good thing.

[Manix]

1. I support outsourcing Smirk to Mars.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

2. These "financial associates and analysts" need to be oursourced....

NOW so that they know what the pain is like too!

[napi21]

3. Lou Dobbs is reaming some idiot about outsourcing!

YEAH Lou!!!!!!!!!!

Some idiot by the name of William Archy.

Quite an argument, but Lou won!

[didntvote4shrub]

4. Great segment!

I was a little surprised to hear Lou doing the "audible sigh" thing in the background, though.. hee hee! ..reminded me of Gore debating Smirk.

Lou's got a big-picture view; our economy is based on US consumers, and if you're not gainfully employed you're not consuming much.

[dpibel]

5. A fine example of the modern American analytical paradigm

In America today, the accepted way to conduct an analysis of whether a particular policy is good or bad is like this:

"Say. That ox over there. The one that's being gored? Is that my ox or your ox?"

I think this is much closer than most of the professional class (the ones who are quite happy to tell an outsourced factory worker to go get a decent education and stop whining fergawdsake) realize.

India is graduating some 20 million degree holders per year -- that's about like the entire population of the US getting a degree every 15 years. They tend to speak English. There's no reason they can't do a great many white-collar jobs, especially with electronic communications. There's really no reason to have your bookkeeping done in the US when you can transfer the data in real time to Bangalore and having someone totting up the figures for pennies on the dollar.

It would even be easy to outsource virtually all legal services. Imagine the money corporations could save on that.

When the class which makes its money providing brain services to the elite start getting outsourced is when you're suddenly going to start hearing the anguished, albeit articulate, howls of pain and outrage.

[mulethree]

6. Already happened

Look at all the mergers of banks, brokerages, asset management firms over the last 10 years or so. Each merger eliminated thousands of wall street type jobs.

See also the foreign banks buying out, or into the domestic banks. Globalization of these firms can mean 10 analysts worldwide where there were previously 30.

Now they will require research groups to be independent from trading and banking groups, so they will "spin off" the research groups which will then consolidate and you will again have 10 researchers where there used to be 30 that used to be 90. Before the massive increases in computerization around 1990, that would have been 200. And sometime back in ancient history, they would have had secretaries and assistants so make it 300.

Mergers = more productivity = fewer jobs

One Merger = more mergers to stay competitive = a wave of mergers = many fewer jobs.

Eventually it quiets down and people get comfortable, then they compete on some basis other than pure productivity until someone shows an advantage, others copy that advantage until at some point you can gain sufficient productivity by merging again - fewer copies of that advantage to maintain and we're back to the start of another wave of mergers.

I loved the recent scandals with the fleet and BoA merger. Both convicted of ripping off their customers in investment funds, both are corporations chartered by the government for the public good. So when they become convicted felons, do we cancel their charters and close them down? No, we give them a fine that barely covers legal fees and then let them merge to increase their profitability.

I guess the fact that they almost got away with it proves that they are "state of the art" (in finance that means they're barely legal - pushing to the line to squeeze out every possible buck the law will allow) and hence viable competitors on the world market so that the US needs them more than it needs justice or law-abiding companies.