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Lunchtime Links: Brutal cuts coming very soon at Merrill Lynch
2 December 2008
We know there are those among you who don’t like to read negative things, so cover your eyes because the weather is not all that’s dismal today. The bleakest of the Prozac-defying items concerns Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, which according to Charlie Gasparino on CNBC are gearing up to cut 10,000 jobs from the combined 53,000 people in their investment bank. This is not new news - the 10k figure has been around for a while and Thain has already promised to slice thousands of jobs from Merrill's back office. But the suggestion that most of those jobs will go from the investment bank is new. So are the suggestions that most of the cuts will be from people at Merrill Lynch and that heads will roll before Christmas.
Credit Suisse cutting another 650 investment banking jobs (Reuters).
Back office staff and (up to 80%) of prop traders to bear the brunt of Credit Suisse cuts (Financial News).
Commodity bonuses to fall 75% (Bloomberg).
Citigroup ends its employee severance supplement (Bloomberg).
Meredith Whitney: I am more bearish today than I have been in the past 18 months (Financial Times).
$2bn loss coming at Goldman in Q4? (Reuters).
Additional round of Goldman layoffs apparently planned for January (Dealbreaker).
"We've cut so much, we've become anaesthetised to the process" (Peston’s Picks).
One third of jobs to go at Aston Martin (Telegraph).
Merrill man by day, club promoter by night (Clusterstock).
More gloomy news is expected and quite frankly putting one's head under a towel and snorting steaming menthol is more fun (Fintag).
Speak to the people at Merrills, they have known for some while that these cuts are coming.Tis the reason that so many of them are hitting the streets hard and looking for new employers. Certainly in London every third CV that we receive seems to come from Merrills. On the whole they are pretty good ( if not a little overpaid!) and there are roles out there as long as realism sets in with regards to remuneration.The world has changed and people must get used to it.Forget the ludicrous guarantees that are being talked of.Employers do not need to go down that route. For every Barcap and Nomura there are 10 employers who are now aware of the state of the job market.
SearchVet 02 Dec 2008
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