Saturday, February 1, 2014

3 Bankers Dead in a Week

There's the stereo type of the 1929 crash and bankers and investors plunging to their deaths. Apparently historically there were about 120 deaths attributed to the Crash on '29, about 20 of them bankers.

It is strange though with the SPX about -4% off it's highs that we have 3 apparent banking suicides within a week, on a former F_E_D member.
What do you think, coincidence or precursor to something the Financial Industry has never seen before?



Two suspected banker suicides in London.
Gabriel Magee, a vice president in J.P. Morgan's technology department in London, fell to his death from the company's skyscraper in Canary Wharf on Tuesday. Police are treating the death as a suicide. The same day, William Broeksmit, until last year a top executive at Deutsche Bank, died at his London home, apparently also by his own hand. Though the reasons are not clear in either case, the coincident deaths will feed the discussion of excessive stress levels in the financial industry, not just for the young interns working 100-hour weeks but also for accomplished executives. Stress-related resignations, heart attacks and suicides may be par for the course in a high-octane, risky businesses, but the public does not really want finance to be one of these: Its money is at stake.

Mike Dueker, the chief economist at Russell Investments, was found dead at the side of a highway that leads to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state, according to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. He was 50.

He may have jumped over a 4-foot (1.2-meter) fence before falling down a 40- to 50-foot embankment, Pierce County Detective Ed Troyer said yesterday. He said the death appeared to be a suicide.

Dueker was reported missing on Jan. 29, and a group of friends had been searching for him along with law enforcement. Troyer said Dueker was having problems at work, without elaborating.

Dueker was in good standing at Russell, said Jennifer Tice, a company spokeswoman. She declined to comment on Troyer’s statement about Dueker’s work issues.

He published dozens of research papers over the past two decades, many on monetary policy, according to the St. Louis Fed’s website, which ranks him among the top 5 percent of economists by number of works published. His most-cited work was a 1997 paper titled “Strengthening the case for the yield curve as a predictor of U.S. recessions,” published by the reserve bank while he was a researcher there.