Staffers in the industry at the heart of the nation's economic woes have been hurt less in the downturn than the rest of the country has. Jobs in the banking and insurance industries have fallen just 5% since the start of the recession. That's half a percentage point less than the 5.4% overall drop in nongovernment employment over the same time period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). And it is far less than the pain experienced by workers in other sectors of the economy.

Hotel-industry employment, for instance, has dropped 7% in the past year. Jobs in the apparel business are down 16%. Work in the temporary-staffing industry has been slashed 26%. Automobile-manufacturing, which lost 30,000 jobs in May alone, is off 29%. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

"You would think because of what went on in the financial-services sector — making this recession a million times worse than it had to be — that we might have seen more of an employment shift," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "Yet the job loss in manufacturing dwarfs what is going on in financial services

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