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WALL Street incomes are surging back.
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The government reported this week that the real wage and salary income of finance industry employees based in Manhattan rose nearly 20 percent in the first quarter of this year. That surge helped make Manhattan the fastest-growing county in the United States in terms of terms of year-over-year gains in income.
Most Wall Street firms pay bonuses in the first quarter of each year, and the figures indicate that bonuses were much higher this year than in the same quarter of 2009. Then, of course, the financial crisis was at its most severe, with stock prices at 12-year lows and major banks being bailed out. It was not a good time to be paying bonuses.
The figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are based on unemployment compensation insurance premiums paid, and thus reflect virtually all employees rather than relying on surveys of workers or employers. Unfortunately, to get such detail requires substantial delays, which is why first-quarter figures are only now coming out.
As can be seen in the accompanying graphic, the average financial industry employee earned just over $100,000 in the first three months of the year, a figure that was up sharply from the same period of 2009 but still below the payouts in the previous three years.
The fact that those averages include bank tellers and trading desk clerks, as well as seniorinvestment bankers, shows just how large many of the bonuses were.
From 1990 — the first year for which figures are available — through 2007, the average financial salary in Manhattan rose almost 7 percent a year, after adjusting for inflation. In 2007, total financial industry pay in Manhattan topped $100 billion for the first time. But the average fell by nearly a quarter by 2009.
New York, unlike other cities, includes five counties, and the data includes only Manhattan, known formally as New York County. The figures cover people who work in the county, regardless of where they live.
New York remains the financial capital of the country. Manhattan has more financial workers than any other county, and those workers have a higher average income than similar workers in any other county.
In the first quarter, only 4.6 percent of the finance workers in the country worked in Manhattan. But they received 14.7 percent of the income paid to all finance workers — giving the average Manhattan worker income about three times as large as the overall figure.
Among counties with at least 20,000 financial industry workers, three of the next five counties with the highest average financial pay in the quarter were in the New York region — Fairfield County, Conn.; Hudson County, N.J.; and Westchester County, N.Y. The others were San Francisco County and Suffolk County (Boston), Mass.
Floyd Norris comments on finance and economics on his blog at nytimes.com/norris.
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