JOBS | Opening for Labor Economist, MA Level

POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT

Full-Time Senior Research Associate

The New York City Labor Market Information Service (NYCLMIS), housed at the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, seeks a full-time senior research associate to work as part of a team that performs research on jobs and the economy, prepares career planning informational tools, and provides strategic consulting. The overall function of the NYCLMIS is to help education, workforce  and economic development policy makers and practitioners to better align their programs and policies to the demands of the labor market  The heart of our work is a mission to advocate for strategies that improve opportunities for those at the bottom of the economic ladder.  For more information about NYCLMIS, see its  website at http://www/gc.cuny.edu/lmis.

With supervision and support from the director of the NYCLMIS and other senior staff, the data research associate will:

§  Analyze economic, labor market, labor force, and other data;

§  Conduct interviews and focus groups;

§  Write reports and briefs;

§  Create presentation materials;

§  Work on multiple projects simultaneously; and

§  Participate in other research and technical assistance activities as needed.

The qualifications NYCLMIC seeks include:
§  Master's degree and at least 3 years professional experience in a related research/policy role (experience may be substituted for education);
§  Strong quantitative skills including data cleaning, merging, analysis, and management:
-         Advanced facility with at least one statistical analysis software package (STATA, R, SAS, SPSS);
-         Experience using a wide variety of public data sources, like the American Community Survey the QCEW, and other New York State Department of Labor products; and
-         Ability to communicate research findings clearly to diverse audiences, including clear writing and production of charts and figures.

§  Experience collecting, analyzing and summarizing information using qualitative methods, such as document review and semi-structured interviews;
§  Familiarity with – or interest in –workforce development policies and programs; and
§  Experience working within a client-centered, team- and project-based environment.

Salary

NYCLMIS offers a competitive salary that is based on the candidate’s experience and skills. The full-time position comes with a generous benefits package including medical, dental, and vision coverage and – after one year of employment – participation in the RFCUNY retirement package.

Growth Potential

The right candidate will be able to take on or advance into other roles including conceiving and designing research projects for submission to competitive grants and directing projects in collaboration and support from the NYCLMIS director.

To apply, go to the RFCUNY Research Jobs web page, and search for PVN # GS-1603-001084 or “senior research associate” at the CUNY Graduate Center. Please be sure to include both resume and cover letter in your application. Only complete applications will be reviewed.

The Research Foundation of the City University of New York is an Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action/Americans with Disabilities act, E-verify employer.

Ec Inequality - Piketty - Milanovic Take Is Glorious and Short

The basic story is that World War II
redistributed wealth, because assets were
wiped out. Inequality is again rising. 

Achilles's mother (the sea-nymph Thetis), prophesied two futures for him. (1) If he took part in the Trojan War, his life would be glorious but short. (2) If he did not, his life would be long but inglorious. Achilles chose glorious but short.

I posted something short about Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twentieth Century on April 12. Piketty has raised the issue of economic inequality in an interesting way.

Yesterday I received  the latest (June 2014) issue of the Journal of Economic Literature with a glorious review by Branko Milanovic of Piketty's book. Milanovic's review is the fourth and last featured article in the journal issue.

If you don't subscribe to this journal, a version of it was issued as a working paper by CUNY and is available here.

The review shows the ways in which Piketty's interpretation and message differ from those of many leading economists of the 20th century. The basic data for the United States (see chart upper left) show that World War II redistributed wealth, because assets were wiped out, and the egalitarian effects lasted until the 1970s. The trend toward greater income inequality returned starting with the Thatcher-Reagan years. Piketty has a theory, based largely on historical tax data, that links the level of inequality to  the relationship between return to capital (r) and economic growth (g). Milanovic warns in the last paragraph of his review:

[The] best compliment that the author of an almost 700-page-long economics book can ever expect to get [is - ] Don't take this book on vacation: it will spoil it. 

In other words, Piketty's book is glorious and long. If you take his advice, I suggest that in the meantime, if you haven't read the book, read Milanovic's glorious-and-short (15-page) review. If you accept the premise of Milanovic's last paragraph, the decision facing the vacation reader is unlike that facing Achilles. In this case there is no tradeoff between glorious and short.

NYC as a Potential #1 Global Tech Leader

L to R: John Tepper Marlin, Helen Keller, Henry Etzkowitz.

Last month I met with my friend Henry Etzkowitz for breakfast. There he is with the hat in the photo at left. I am taking the picture (a "selfie") with my right hand. Behind us is a portrait of Helen Keller that reminds me of the thought, “None so blind as cannot see,” an idea dating back before Oedipus to Jeremiah 5:21.

On the appropriate policies for encouraging technology, Etzkowitz is my guru. He travels around the country and the world picking up honors for his documentation of policy successes, and I update him on recent developments in NY State and NY City, the most interesting of which is the Cornell-Technion Center on Roosevelt Island.

Over the last two decades we have often shaken our heads together at the failures of NYC policy-making to encourage technology as an engine of local economic development.

Tech Policy, NYC, 1995-1999 

Our shared interest in tech policy goes back to the 1990s when I was serving as chief economist for the second of the three NY City Comptrollers, between 1992 and 2006. The chief economist function was created by new responsibilities conferred by the 1990 NYC Charter Revision on the Office of the NY City Comptroller.

(The Comptroller, an elected official, is currently John Liu. Eliot Spitzer has just thrown his hat in the ring to succeed Liu. Outgoing Borough President Scott Stringer has for months been considered the most likely to be elected.)

The City Comptroller's office has been included in economic-development planning - for example, in a 1995 conference organized by the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bill McDonough. The NY Fed called together leading institutions in the region to explore New York’s potential for transition to a knowledge economy, imitating the initiative taken before and after World War II by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and leading to the expansion of tech startups along Route 128. The Lower Manhattan Association provided administrative support for the NY Fed’s conference, and a young science-policy graduate, Michael Salvato, worked on the program. Etzkowitz was a key participant, as the then-director of SUNY’s Science Policy Institute.

Magnificent it was, but not sustained. Few participating institutions signed up for the follow-up phase. Contrast this with the New England Council, a decades-long effort from the 1920s that sought to follow the model that led to Silicon Valley, by systematizing the high-tech spinning-off fostered at Harvard and MIT.

The New England Council sustained its effort first in scientific instruments at the turn of the 20th century, then in radio in the 1920s. Their work helped create Small Business Investment Companies and the entire venture capital industry after World War II. When I was at the Small Business Administration in the 1960s, I was able to study at close quarters the successes of the SBIC program. The American Research and Development Corporation was founded in 1946 as a pro bono regional development effort. A decade later it founded the Digital Equipment Projects, which was intended to create better aircraft training simulators but engineered the mini-computer along the way.

Why Did the NYC Regional Effort Fail? 

So why was the effort not sustained in New York City, in contrast to the Bay Area and Route 128?

Maybe

• Silicon Alley was considered to be doing okay by itself and the involvement of government and universities wasn't seen as necessary. 
• NYC software firms that were competing with the Bay Area and Route 128 by supporting Wall Street's highly proprietary electronification projects did not see any value in regional cooperation. 
• Their growth was resisted by traditional parts of the advertising industry, which felt that it was being cannibalized. (The AOL merger with Time Warner did not seem to be good for the traditional information and communication businesses.)
• Some knowledgable tech people felt that NYC was too far behind Stanford and MIT both on the entrepreneurial front and in the sophistication of its programming to begin to compete. 
• Others decided that nothing more was needed than a professional association - first the NY New Media Association, then the NY Software Industry Association (which evolved into an incubator that depended too much on its real estate viability) and the putatively broader-based Tech Council.)

The NYC Software/IT Industry Report, 1999 

In this environment, the NYC Comptroller’s Office published a report, under my direction, on the “NYC Software/IT Industry” in April 1999 (summary and links to pdf files here). The NY Times covered it well, including with its summary of the report a photo of the Comptroller. The Chancellor of CUNY, Professor Harry Markowitz, told the Comptroller he loved the report. The Comptroller was pleased and generously said so. Etzkowitz played a key role in helping us define the history of tech policy and an appropriate path forward for NYC, as reflected in the last few chapters of the report.

The Report showed that New York had most of the elements required for a world-class technology center:

• A public-school system that provides a steady supply of well-trained high school graduates who are ready to grapple with technology issues at the university level.
• Close cooperation among regional universities, private and state-run (and definitely including community colleges), to ensure strong support for entrepreneurs seeking high-quality technical staff.
• Centers of technology excellence among the universities, especially schools of engineering, and supportive faculty at business and law schools.
• Training for technology experts in tech transfer and entrepreneurship.
• University-based incubator labs and university support for policies that reward labs and centers and individuals within them for innovation. 
• Business interest in, and support for, bringing university-based ideas to market in a collaborative environment.
• Government support for technology to encourage university-business cooperation.

The big missing tooth in this dazzling smile was the entrepreneurial skills created by the open communication between universities and business in Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Mass.  NYU and Columbia around that time announced they were going to work more closely together on research and technology initiatives.

The Dot-Com Bust and Mayor Bloomberg’s First Two Terms 

However, in fact technology took a back seat after the sharp drop in dot-com share values in spring and fall 2000. The NY Academy of Sciences won a million-dollar grant from the STARR foundation, but the large universities were not impressed and most of the funds went to support publications drawing attention to the tech assets of the region. A seminar series drew second-tier administrators and junior faculty, with the notable exception of the President of New York Poly in Brooklyn.

One practical result was the creation of a network of area university technology officers who spun off their own support network. After 9/11, and the election of a mayor who had made his fortune by selling technology services in the form of Bloomberg machines, Etzkowitz and I expected the new mayor to lead a major tech initiative that would make the City of New York into a tech center that might eclipse both Silicon Valley and Route 128.

We were disappointed. The new mayor made clear he was a businessman first and techie second, and he did not undertake any major tech initiatives in his first two terms. He made up for that in his third term with the competition that led to the Cornell-Technion project, but if he had stuck to the term limits in City Charter he would not have left much of a tech legacy.

For the ten years after the Comptroller's Software Report, Etzkowitz and did what we could to keep the recommendations of the software report in front of people who might implement them. Etzkowitz organized the NY Inter-University Seminar on Innovation, bringing researchers and practitioners together from across the region. We had monthly meetings with guest speakers who discussed the recommendations for inter-university cooperation for technology development. We deliberately did not meet at universities, but mostly in the Comptroller’s Office and sometimes the conference rooms of law and business offices.

In 2001 I wrote to the Mayor about creating a technology-transfer office comparable to the Mayor’s film and broadcasting office. In 2002 I met with Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff on the subject.  Etzkowitz also tried to get some interest from the new Mayor.

While the NYC Economic Development Corporation did some good things to assist firms involved in the knowledge economy, their focus was largely on matching up available real estate with business needs. They took action when real estate opportunities meshed with tech promotion.

The Cornell-Technion Initiative and NYC’s Potential 

In 2012, as the Cornell-Technion Roosevelt Island initiative took shape, Etzkowitz and I felt that our thesis of the missing link in NYC’s innovation ecosystem — a Stanford-MIT-like institution focusing on commercializing knowledge, tech transfer and incubation, as well as basic research and education - had found a place on NYC’s policy agenda.

In retrospect, it looks as though to get the interest of Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff we should have translated the Software Report recommendations into a real estate-driven project. When I met with Doctoroff I should have come in with a plan not just for policy but for leveraging $100 million in vacant city land and municipal bonding to attract 20 times that in university and business investment.

A lot of cities are trying to emulate the success of the Bay Area and Route 128. The typical competitors are state capitals with a local university like Albany, N.Y. or Austin, Tex. or Raleigh, N.C. On the Cornell-Technion plan, Etzkowitz comments:

Mayor Bloomberg’s Roosevelt Island project is now focusing on master’s-level students. But research groups require a variety of skills and levels of involvement, including Ph.D. students, post-doctoral fellows, teaching faculty, research associates and undergraduates, supported by large-scale research funding, typically from the federal government, with state government and industry support at the margin.

I remember attending a meeting of MIT alumni in NYC, when Mayor Bloomberg had just published his book and was contemplating a run for Mayor to succeed Giuliani. He emphasized how competition keeps everyone on their toes. Afterwards I spoke with an MIT professor who said that NYC would never catch up to Route 128 because it didn't have the entrepreneurial spirit. Etzkowitz thinks this is still a problem: "NYC still needs an MIT-type institution, along with a system of mentoring research groups to generate spinoffs. Entrepreneurship is a group activity."

One of the hopes of Mayor Bloomberg's economic development team is that Technion - which has a strong record of generating spinoffs - will stimulate Cornell and together they will light a fire under NYU, Columbia, CUNY and SUNY. Etzkowitz sees some potential in some "home team" NYC projects:

NYU has a big data analysis center focused on urban issues, building upon its mathematical strengths and industry links. Columbia is breaking its geographical boundaries, expanding its technology projects above 120th street and linking with City College, in a joint biomedical/engineering research center, building on the strengths of these two schools. NYC also has special assets. The SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology spins out boutique fashion firms, continuing the Institute’s role of bringing together industry and labor to helped the garment industry grow into the fashion industry. Similarly, the SUNY at Purchase theater and dance schools operate on an implicit incubator model, graduating theater and dance troupes into NYC’s thriving cultural economy.

A key to the future is how state governments are responding to their revenue challenges. Etzkowitz  thinks that underfunding of schools in California since Proposition 13 and cutbacks in support of the University of California may damage the Bay Area franchise. Massachusetts, meanwhile, is going in the other direction, funding its public schools and universities.

Henry, thank you for our conversations. And for you, the reader who has read this far - there is more to this story, so stay tuned! (Follow tweets on Twitter - @cityeconomist.) (August 14, 2014: See followup post here.)

NYPD | Does It Need an Inspector General?

The new wing of John Jay College, fronting on 11th Avenue, NYC. All photos by JT Marlin.

October 25, 2012 - Does the New York City Police Department need an Inspector-General?

That was the question before a panel at John Jay College this morning. The idea has been championed by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law.

It is a strong alliance. John Jay College has just gone through a large expansion in its capacity, and the Brennan Center is a fierce fighter for the underdogs of the American public - and more narrowly the NYC public.

I attended the meeting at the suggestion of the NJ Institute for Social Justice, which I serve as Chief Economist. These notes on the meeting are my personal impressions. Any opinions expressed here are my own and are not necessarily those of the NJISJ.

One can't be engaged in policy issues in the NYC area without running into both John Jay and the Brennan Center. When I was investigating the underground economy as Chief Economist for the NYC Comptroller's Office, the Brennan Center invited me to a meeting of their street vendors association. Vendors made a strenuous case to me that they try to stay within the boundaries of the law. However, they said, these boundaries often change in arbitrary ways. Police interpretation of the law changes and the vendors are not always notified.

Elected officials ordinarily support the Police Commissioner and NYPD because police officers put their lives on the line and the public and their representatives can never be too grateful for that. But we have seen too many videotapes of bad-apple officers engaged in provocation or excessive use of force to be complacent about the extent to which every individual NYPD officer observes all the rules. That is the context of the proposal for an IG.

The Proposal

The Brennan Center has put together an attractive, well-documented, 40-page report making this case:
- Counter-terrorism and intelligence operations create new concerns about civil liberties.
- Intelligence oversight has special problems because abuse of power can be hard to prove.
- Existing oversight of the NYPD is inadequate to meet current challenges.
- Court oversight doesn't address reporting and monitoring needs.
- The Inspector General idea has been tried in Washington with success.
- A Police Auditor concept has also been tried with success.
- The NYPD needs an IG or similar body.

Jeremy Travis, President, John Jay College, CUNY 

The meeting was opened by John Jay President Jeremy Travis, who is riding high as the 620,000 sf, 13-story new building is finally open for business, filling in the entire area between 10th and 11th Avenues. Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center Liberty and National Security Program, introduced the meeting along with Donna Lieberman of the NY Civil Liberties Union, and then the panel members spoke in turn.

F. Warren ("Ned") Benton moderated the panel; he directs the MPA-IG track at John Jay, the only MPA program that is expressly devoted to inspection and oversight and the role of the IG. During the Q&A he emphasized the availability of standards from the association of IGs - how to do audits and reports and peer reviews.

L to R: Prof. Patrick O'Hara, Prof. Eugene O'Donnell, Ms. Faiza Patel, Prof.
Warren ("Ned") Benton, Ms. Donna Lieberman. 

Faiza Patel, Co-Director, Brennan Center

A graduate of Harvard College and NYU Law School, Ms. Patel says she is not anti-police - the NYPD is a "great department".

Rather, she is concerned about giving the NYPD a  "blank check". The stop, question and frisk program, aka "Stop and Frisk", has increased the number of random stops 600 percent.

The NYPD keeps emphasizing the importance of trust between the community and the police, but "Stop and Frisk" has frayed the community's trust. What an IG for the NYPD would do is bring in sunlight - transparency and accountability - to departmental systems. She emphasizes, as she did (with Elizabeth Goitein) in a New York Times Op-Ed on January 30, that her interest is not so much individual cases, but systematic inadequacies in procedures for training and operations.

Professor Patrick O'Hara, John Jay

Professor O'Hara led the development of the John Jay IG program. His writing addresses the dysfunctions in a police department that can generate problems and lack of accountability. In his comments he shows how existing NYPD oversight bodies - Internal Affairs and the Commission to Combat Police Corruption and the Civilian Complaint Review Board - had a role to play in processing individual complaints and cases but they did not address systemic NYPD problems. They and the Department of Investigation don't have the "structural positioning" that is needed to deal with systemic problems.

The IG, he says, would not be "overkill". What no existing body can do, and what the NYPD needs, he says, is what an IG would make possible - a reporting relationship of the NYPD to a body that will "let the chips fall where they may" ("fiat justitia, ruat caelum").

The Governor of Indiana has described the IG in Indiana as a "profit center" because it improves the state's efficiency and effectiveness. The IG has the "'structural logic" to get the job done, whether the individuals who staff the IG are brilliant or inept. It is the best way to assess the NYPD's concept of "policing by the numbers".

He did not think it should be viewed as a narrowly defined entity concerned only with civil liberties abuses. The IG concept has worked in NYC in corrections, education, fire, sanitation. The pedigree has been proven at the Federal level. It is an idea whose time may have come.

Donna Lieberman, Executive Director, NYCLU

NYC Councilwoman Brewer, standing in back..

Donna Lieberman heads up the NYCLU, having previously worked as a criminal defense attorney for the Legal Aid Society in the South Bronx office. She is easy to hear over the noise of the HVAC, which was noted afterwards by several older listeners who complained about the audio system or how it was utilized.  She believes that the NYPD can't do its job without an IG, whether its new anti-terrorism job or its traditional law-and-order job.

"It is asking too much of the City Council to do the NYPD oversight, although this is not to let them off the hook." (Councilwoman Gale Brewer, Chair of the Technology Committee of the City Council, attended part of the meeting.) The NYPD is made "a laughingstock" on television news or drama programs for its lack of oversight. She mentions the 17-year-old who caught an officer on tape calling him a "mutt".

She claims there is a "racist animus" in the NYPD and wonders who is going to "connect the dots". The Mayor delegates - the Rand Report recommendations were inadequate.

She singled out the school safety program as having no policy oversight. The result of the deficiencies is a huge cost in litigation, lost credibility and a loss of rights among the citizenry. Kids lose their faith in school.

Merrick Bobb, Special Counsel,  LA County Board of Supervisors

Merrick Bobb, Special Counsel, LA Co. Board
of Supervisors

Bobb's role is similar to that of an IG. He says that an IG needs unfettered access to the police and other agencies, and its needs adequate facilities and staff. A starved IG is not going to be effective. The NYPD is a big department and a shoestring budget won't get the IG job done.

He favors the idea behind the funding of the Independent Budget Office in New York City, which has a budget linked to 10 percent of the OMB budget.

The IG's office needs to be "insulated from the politics of the moment". It needs lawyers, yes, but also a strong quantitative capability, people who are sophisticated at statistical analysis and can make judgments based on seeing reports by precincts and longitudinal studies of statistics over time.

Question Period

Q1. The first questioner, a woman in a headscarf, asks whether the IG's office would be legal under state law. If not, this is all a waste of time.
A. Lieberman says that the IG is needed for transparency and the issue of legality is not so clear.

Bruce Rosen ("Citizen"), far right, asks question.

Q2. A man who identifies himself as "a citizen" and whom I recognize as Bruce Rosen, notes that during the Occupy Wall Street activities the police officers were pulling people away from the Wall Street bull. Why were they doing that? In what way was that considered worthy of special protection by the police?
A. Yes, the Mayor and prosecutors got a "free pass" on a lot of what went on.

Q3. The City Council tried to set up an IG type monitor but it doesn't have the power to do this.
A. Mayor Bloomberg doesn't think the NYPD needs this. The greatest expansion of oversight was under Mayor Dinkins. What the Mayor and the public need to consider, says Patel, is the costs of the existing system with the NYPD having no IG, i.e., the settlements that have to be negotiated and the lawyers that need to be hired.

Q4. Yonkers set up an IG type monitor but the office has found it hard to pursue its investigations in the face of police department resistance.
A. The NYC Campaign Finance Board is a good model. By appointing strong leadership it has been able to get the job done.

The Ongoing LIBOR Scandal

One way New York City stimulates its residents is with hundreds of educational and cultural events, more in a day than anyone could attend in a year. Today I chose to be educated at a discussion offered by The Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College on the LIBOR scandal, headed "Are They Still Playing Games in London?"

First in the fall 2012 series of the Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity, the discussion is led  by David Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Law and associate director of the Center. He interviewed Peter Eavis, a business investigative reporter for The New York Times and before that a reporter for  TheStreet.com, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal. He won a Loeb Award for commentary in 2005 for articles spelling out the accounting troubles at Fannie Mae. He was early in spotting problems with Enron's books and he uncovered accounting issues at Conseco, Qwest and Amazon.com.  A British national, Mr. Eavis was born in Canada and graduated from Leeds University in the UK. Here are the highlights of the narrative, delivered mostly by Mr. Eavis:

LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, is supposed to be the interest rate at which banks lend to one another. Someone calls around in the morning and asks what rate each bank could borrow in different currencies and 15 different maturities, from overnight to 12 months. The "panel banks" are selected by the British Bankers Association. The highest and lowest 25 percent are eliminated and the other 50 percent are averaged by Thomson Reuters.

Trouble is, the loan market dried up in 2007. The concept depends on there being an active market for loans. In 2007, banks began worrying more about their balance sheets and put their money into government bonds instead of riskier loans.

Banks completely stopped lending to one another.  If a bank needed funds, it borrowed from the European Central Bank or the Bank of England. The LIBOR continued to be published, but the numbers were just made up. So what else is new? A lot of indicators are based on surveys that amount to opinions. But it gets worse.

During the banking crisis of 2008, LIBOR was systematically understated. In order to appear more solvent than they were, banks quoted low rates like 1 percent for the 3-month LIBOR whereas in fact they would have to pay a lot more assuming they could get a loan at all.

Reuters journalist Carrick Mollenkamp in April 2008 noted the low-balling problem.  He said it was widely known on Canary Wharf that the LIBOR was fictional. The bank regulators (especially the British financial overseers and the Federal Reserve Bank of NY) started investigation. The low quoted rates gave people confidence that the banks were in better shape than they really were. This bought some time and is the positive side of what happened. Some argue that this was like moving the lines of the football field - it was still a fair game. But people made decisions relying on information that many other players knew was false. And it gets worse.

A much worse problem is that traders were influencing the LIBOR estimates to make profits. The U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission suspected something was amiss and demanded an investigation by Barclays. Complying fully with the request, Barclays provided emails of traders talking with one another about modifying the LIBOR to help interest-linked derivatives (options, swaps, futures) make a profit when they came due. When the Barclays report was released it caused a firestorm in the UK. Barclays paid a $450 million fine and senior managers were forced out.

How was corporate integrity compromised so broadly? "Everyone was doing it." (Rosenberg)
"Small differences in rates, no one seemed to be hurt." (Eavis) But others ask: "Why has no one gone to jail?" (Eavis)

Some "very strange" outcomes and messages.
1. LIBOR continues to be published. A commission to replace it hasn't done it yet.
2. The major message for traders - use the phone, not emails. 
3. Another message - maybe don't comply with data requests so energetically. On the other hand, Barclays might have been treated even more harshly if they had not been cooperative.
4. Some feel the crime was victimless, but by creating winners they also created losers. U.S. municipalities are figuring out how they were hurt; in some cases it is obvious and big-time.

What lies ahead.
1. More lawsuits and government action. The NY State Superintendent of Financial Institutions broke from the pack and went after Standard Chartered, sponsor of the Liverpool Football team. He won't be the last.
2. Dodd-Frank requires more transparency. Derivatives will have to be on more transparent platforms.
3. LIBOR will be replaced.