Young, cheap and American

MANY are the investment banks that have expanded their back-office operations to countries such as India. It's a lot cheaper to hire someone in Bangalore than in Boston, and the state of the markets has meant that banks have been desperate to screw down costs. This has been especially true of their information-technology departments. Indian programmers come at a small fraction of the price of their rich-world counterparts, and are often better qualified and more competent. Now the investment-banking arm of Citigroup has hit on a novel way of reversing the trend: hiring American college undergraduates instead and sitting them at unused desks.