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JPMorgan Dimon’s darlings may have delivered net income of $3.1bn for the investment bank in 2007 while all else (except Goldman Sachs) fell apart, but they won’t be paid anything extra for their efforts. The bank’s 4Q results reveal that 148 of their number were culled between October and January, while average total compensation per JPMorgan investment banker declined nearly 10% to $312k (£158k). This is less than the... Read more

Wondering what to do while you wait for investment banks to rise from the ashes? Courtesy of the UK Office of National Statistics, here are the mean salaries for the 20 best paying jobs for men working full time in the UK during 2008. 1. Director/chief executive of a major organization: £136k 2. Corporate managers and ‘senior officials’: £110k 3. Medical practitioners: £80k 4. Health professionals: £74k 5. Aircraft pilots and flight engineers: £74k 6. Financial managers and chartered secretaries: £70k 7. Senior... Read more

On the slight chance that you may be able to leave your current employer and work for a rival with a less onerous approach towards bonus reform, which banks are being the least harsh? Here’s our ranking, with the most favourable at the top. 1). JPMorgan: While other banks are talking about clawbacks and very long deferrals, JPMorgan remains relatively unrepentant on current bonus structures. Little has been said publicly... Read more

Contrary to hope/expectation, it now appears that UBS has done the deed and paid zero bonuses to a lot of people in its investment bank. CNBC reports that US managing directors and senior vice presidents at UBS were told yesterday they will be paid absolutely nothing at all as a bonus this year, followed by 100% stock bonuses in 2010, a third of which will vest next year, another third... Read more

Fresh from all the palpitations over potential bonuses at Goldman Sachs, a new movement is afoot to generate a little frisson around the possible size of this year’s payouts at Barclays Capital. According to The Guardian they will be big, particularly at the old Lehman business in the US, where many people are allegedly on guarantees. Alphaville has also been stoking the Barclays bonus excitement. Last week it ran an... Read more

Following this week's claims that there can't possibly be only 350,000 people earning more than £150k in the UK, here's something to resolve the issue. The Institute for Fiscal Studies' where do you fit in calculator shoes where you rank in the UK according to your net income and number of dependents. We've referred to it before (it's not clear whether it's been updated since then), but it seems a good... Read more

Alistair Darling is still unveiling his budget revelations, but the big news so far is that anyone earning more than £150k a year is in for a shock. Although Darling emphasised that he intends to "retain [Britain's] position a world centre for finance," the following measures are likely to hit the City disproportionately – - Anyone on an income above £150k (350,000 people) will see their marginal tax rate rise to... Read more

Analyst bonus time is coming around again and it doesn’t look entirely pretty. Early figures from the one top US bank that’s remained unscathed by the credit crunch suggest first-year analysts will fare the worst. Meanwhile, for the first time ever it seems analysts are set to receive some of their bonuses in stock. First of all, here are last year’s figures – courtesy of recruitment firm The Cornell Partnership:... Read more

This may not come as any consolation if you worked at Deutsche and happen to have lost your job just before bonuses were announced, but it seems the bank pays some of the best severance packages around. Based on headcount reductions over the year, Deutsche’s fourth quarter results suggest the average severance payment in the corporate and investment bank during 2008 was €229k (£199k). This compares very handsomely with Goldman, which... Read more

It looks like MDs are being sacrificed for the good of associates. According to a mystery (and therefore possibly spurious) post on yesterday’s Deutsche Bank article, associate pay at DB is down only 20% on last year, while MDs are being paid down 80%. Similar things seem to be happening at BofA, where Ken Lewis yesterday sent a memo with the following message for junior bankers - I know that every... Read more

Did VPs receive some of the biggest pay increases in the last bonus round? A new salary survey suggests they may well have done. Recruitment firm Fennemore Banks’ study of 238 London bankers suggests vice presidents (VPs) in investment banking saw bonuses up an average of 18%. This was higher than the boost received by most associates, and higher than analysts’ average rise of 16%. Adam Cairns, a director at Fennemore Banks,... Read more

As has been variously noted, guaranteed bonuses have made a comeback in 2009. And rumour has it that some of the packages on offer this year have been very large – at 2007 levels, or higher. Based on consensus estimates from several headhunters, we have therefore constructed the following league table of the alleged guarantees paid to this year’s biggest hires. Please note that none of these figures have been confirmed... Read more

If you’re looking for a banking job and don’t secure one in the next ten days, the likelihood increases dramatically that you’ll still be looking at Christmas. In ten days it will be August 1st. In August everyone goes on holiday and it becomes difficult to a) arrange interviews and b) get hires signed off. There’s a brief window in which this can be achieved in early September, but come... Read more

CNBC has produced a handy ranking of the S&P's leanest companies based on revenue and profit per employee. It shows, as we have stated before, that investment banking is nothing special. Ranked against the best in class from other industries, investment banking's finest - Goldman Sachs - didn't do too well last year. As the graphs below show, it was beaten by the best performers in the leisure, food beverage... Read more