The New York Times reports that Wall St. is back in a big way since the 2007 crisis: profits, salaries and confidence have returned in the US financial industry. As often happens when I see something intriguing like this about the US, I wanted to quickly see whether a similar dynamic is taking place in Canada. Turns out that Bay St. is doing better than ever too…though it never really went away.
To illustrate this, consider two of the charts used in the Times piece, both augmented with Canadian data. First up, employment in the financial sector. While the US saw the number of securities and investment workers flatline after the crisis, Canada has continued to see more growth, only plateauing more recently. Today a greater percentage of total employment is in the investment subsector than in the US.
