Major Wall Street investment firms such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup “are mulling the benefits of shipping research jobs to countries like India, where salaries for business graduates are as little as 10 percent of those in New York and London,” reported Reuters on May 4th. “U.S. banks, brokerages, mutual companies and other financial services companies are planning to relocate 500,000 jobs offshore, or 8 percent of their work force, over the next five years.”

The half-million figure actually represents the low-end estimate: An April 30th BBC News story cited a report from Deloitte Research projecting that “two million jobs will move offshore from the world’s 100 largest financial services companies over the next five years.” “Every bank on Wall Street will eventually use the cost benefits offshore to maintain their research businesses,” an “executive at a major investment bank” told Reuters. Most of those jobs will be relocated to India, with China, South Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia also standing to benefit from this orgy of outsourcing.