eFinancialCareers

Given that taxes and death are ineluctable certainties in any economic climate, jobs related to medicine and tax ‘massaging’ should be well placed to withstand any downturn. But while most bankers will struggle to quickly reinvent themselves as GPs, the secretive and lucrative world of tax structuring ought to be more accessible. Banks like Barclays Capital, Deutsche, and Morgan Stanley have some of the biggest tax teams in the... Read more

The FX and rates business within investment banks has provided some welcome income for battered balance sheets this year and there’s been a steady stream of recruitment as a result. However, could the good times soon be over? In its third-quarter results, JPMorgan posted a 19% revenue increase in its fixed income division, due to “record” performance in rates and currencies. It’s a similar story at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley... Read more

Forget Morgan Stanley (for a moment), is Deutsche going to be next in line for something unpleasant? Earlier this week, the German bank announced plans to expand its business and private clients division and to eliminate 1,100 jobs in the back office. But it has been silent over headcount in the corporate and investment bank. This is strange given that Deutsche’s corporate and investment bank is in a challenging place. According... Read more

Way, way back in March, stung by criticism of its handling of Northern Rock, the FSA declared its intention to up its intake of former bankers, including quant types to work on its frontline supervision teams, focusing “on the complex models used by banks to gauge financial risk” (FT). Its timing was impeccable. With thousands of banking employees subsequently let go and Lehman’s entire risk, compliance and trading teams on... Read more

Disillusioned? Disaffected? Distressed that you might be the recipient of a bonus no larger than a mouse dropping? If you’re a proprietary trader, then don’t assume that you can make amends by nipping over to a friendly proprietary trading house. According to the Financial Times, prop trading houses are all the rage. Earlier this week, it quoted Grant Ashton, managing director of trading house Infinity Capital, who said there... Read more

While everywhere else has had had all the vivacity of Gordon Brown in Southwold, Russia has been one of the only places where banks have been falling over themselves to hire and retain staff. People on the ground are adamant that the little issue of Georgia won’t put a stop to it. “Under ordinary circumstances, you’d be correct to think that banks might pull back,” says Eric Kraus, head of... Read more

Surprise news - several headhunters suggest some of Dresdner Kleinwort's bankers are actually quite high calibre. Many of them may even be employable elsewhere. This is handy as Commerzbank’s apparently planning to dump 1,000 of them. Then again, headhunters may be lying. According to The Times, prop traders and equities staff are top of the list for the chop at Dresdner Kleinwort. Finextra is predicting IT and back-office staff will... Read more

If you want to make big money in life, the best careers to go for are (in descending order): trading, ‘general finance’ (AKA all areas of finance that aren’t trading or insurance), law, and…recruitment. Based on pay figures drawn from clients of wealth manager ‘The Route’, the average top end trader is earning £1.5m, the average top end ‘general financier’ is earning £1m, the average top end lawyer earns £572k,... Read more

FSA chief Hector Sants has come out of the closet and said bonuses should be taken into account when assessing banks’ risk. But we'd like to point out that it wasn’t his idea. Sants seems to have latched onto a notion first aired by Alchemy Partners’ founder Jon Moulton last week. So how does Jon think the plan Sants has pilfered from him would work? “I presume you’d... Read more

It’s down to regulators to reform the bonus system. And given regulators are powerless to intervene, reform looks as likely as a small village in Hampshire becoming the financial centre of the UK. Regulators are certainly making scary noises. From Mervyn King’s anti-bonus diatribe, to Sir Callum McCarthy’s call for banks to emphasise long-term performance, snarls and grunts about bonuses have been emanating from the regulatory corner for several months.... Read more

It was a good week for hedge funds – unless you were GLG. Banks were still busily lopping staff, although there were rays of hiring in commodities and – strangely enough – leveraged finance. Hedge funds provided reasons to be cheerful. Hedge Fund Research predicted investors plan to pour $200bn into hedge funds this year. ICAP launched an African hedge fund. It emerged that the replica hedge funds... Read more

Will an MBA really do wonders for your banking career, asks George Trower, our resident columnist and banker under cover. The MBA is much maligned. Despite that fact, MBAs are being pumped out in greater and greater numbers and firms are lapping them up offering higher and higher pay packages. In my own experience, a business school gives you all of the following and more: 1. A... Read more

UBS may be eliminating swathes of trading jobs, but Merrill Lynch has shown that banks are still prepared to pay big, big money for the right person. According to the Wall Street Journal, Merrill’s paying $50m to win the affections of former Goldman trading star Thomas Montag, who’s joining as global head of sales and trading for the bank’s debt and equities business. Merrill’s munificence coincides with news of... Read more

Lost your job in an investment bank and want to work on the buyside? You’ll be lucky. The Financial Times ran an article yesterday which said that Pimco, the world’s biggest fixed income fund manager, has been approaching Wall Street banks that are making redundancies in the hope of hoovering up a few of their cast-offs. But before anyone gets the wrong idea, moving from an investment bank to the... Read more