So, where does this leave Anglo Irish's employees?

After months of deliberation, Anglo Irish Bank's future has been decided - the nationalised lender is to be split into a (good) "funding bank" that will continue to run and a (bad) "asset recovery bank" that will be sold or run off over time.

In short, what this means for Anglo is no more lending - the Funding Bank will essentially act as a retail operation, offering a "secure home" for new and existing customer deposits and, well, nothing else.

The Asset Recovery Bank will manage those nasty loans that haven't been transferred across to NAMA. This will consist of €38bn in loans and it will have €14bn of senior and subordinated bonds.

This doesn't look great for the remaining Anglo employees, a large proportion of whom operate outside of the retail space.

The plan is certainly a deviation away from Anglo's suggestion unveiled in its interim report, which attempted to make the case for the 'good bank' moving away from property and into commercial banking.

This could have gone some way to satisfy the government's ongoing calls for more lending to the SME sector and would have required Anglo to recruit bankers with the relevant expertise to allow it to do so.

Still, a raft of redundancies isn't necessarily on the cards. Let's not forget that Anglo only recently recruited Mark Layther to lead its Group Recovery Management Unit, the aim of which was to manage risky loans not transferred across to NAMA (to be run down over time).

This, of course, sounds suspiciously like the Asset Recovery Bank.

We understand that Layther has only just begun building his team, and the unit is a natural internal transfer target for bankers currently working in the credit or lending divisions of Anglo.

This doesn't exactly look like a shaky career prospect in the short term - there's currently little clarity on how much the Anglo wind-down will cost or, importantly for its employees, how long it will take.

Even more implausibly, a number of recruitment sources declined to comment because Anglo is still hiring. Its 92-strong (as at June 30) NAMA unit continues to grow.

"Today's decision by the government will provide certainty about the future of Anglo Irish Bank. Resolution of this, our most distressed institution, is essential to the promotion of confidence and stability in our financial system," said Brian Lenihan, minister for finance.