Bear Stearns interns learn about business the hard way
— -- For much of this school year, Fabienne Bruneau spent three hours a day compiling summaries of major financial news stories, preparing for a competitive recruiting process for internships at major Wall Street banks.
After a 4½-hour interview with Bear Stearns earlier this semester, the New York University junior landed a summer position in its global equities division with the sales and trading team. This month, she was notified she had lost her internship, a casualty of JPMorgan's recent purchase of Bear Stearns to prevent it from going bankrupt.
"You feel like you won the lottery, and now someone stole it away from you," she says.
Bruneau is just one of hundreds of Bear Stearns hires questioning their futures after the fire sale of the country's fifth-largest investment bank and deep cutbacks at other banks. At least 105,000 financial jobs have been lost since March 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The U.S. banking industry could drop another 150,000 to 200,000 jobs in the next 12 to 18 months, estimates financial consulting firm Celent.
Because JPMorgan hired its own summer interns, it can only absorb Bear Stearns' intern hires in areas where the two firms' operations didn't overlap. Those businesses include prime brokerage, commodities, asset management and merchant banking. Bear Stearns hired about 300 full-time employees and 300 interns this year. JPMorgan has taken on roughly 60% of them, says JPMorgan spokesman Brian Marchiony.
Non-profit opportunities
Those who don't work at JPMorgan this summer won't necessarily lose out on paychecks, though. JPMorgan is coordinating internships for Bear Stearns hires at non-profit organizations in strategy, finance, marketing and project-management positions and will pay them the same summer salary they were promised by Bear Stearns, Marchiony says. Those interns will also be among the first round of external applicants considered for full-time jobs in the fall. The company has no figures yet on how many hires will take non-profit offers.
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