Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Closed Case: White & Case Law Firm to Cut 170 Employees

White & Case scales back their employment and 170 people will find themselves out of work as a result. Out of these, many are presumably high paid lawyers in the New York City area. This can not portend well to ther local shopping and real estate markets when taken in conjunction with the financial sector carnage.

One of the things that needs to firm up before the economy hits the road to recovery is housing should stabilize. This is the common wisdom and I believe it needs to happen, but many other things need to happen as well. Also, playing make pretend about the housing value due to moratorium of foreclosures is not the stability the housing market needs for recovery. It needs to be realistically priced and until then we are just spitting into the wind.

Of course, there's a wide plethora of adjustments that need to be made before we find our way to the bottom. Anyone narrowly focussed on housing as the simple data point that cures all our ills is a fool. It was a full credit bubble that needs a fair degree of unwinding. Some of that credit chased houses, other parts of it went elsewhere.

No comments: