Lateish Lunchtime Links: More redundancies at Macquarie and Credit Suisse; some evidence of staff extraction at Deutsche

Time is dribbling on, and costs at some banks remain unsustainably high.

Unsurprisingly, banks are doing a little trimming. Hence, Credit Suisse is now said to be laying off up to 250 people in the US. And Macquarie is said to be laying off 60 members (predominantly secretaries) of its 590-strong infrastructure team in London.

There are also indications that Deutsche may have been doing a little cutting. Even though headcount in its corporate and investment bank was up by 502 people in the third quarter, spending on severance payments was up 260% year-on-year. It seems likely that many of those 502 additional people were graduate trainees and that Deutsche has been letting a few of its more experienced staff go.

There is evidence that US banks' in the third quarter were given a one-off nudge by the release of loan loss reserves. (WSJ)

How Todd Combs got his job. (BusinessInsider)

The banks have no intention of ceasing their prop trading. They are merely disguising the activity, by giving it some other name. (Bloomberg)

Something's amiss. Without a bubble, Wall Street is a lacklustre industry. (MarketWatch)

Deutsche Bank appears to be paying more than Goldman Sachs. (Bloomberg)

Big banks are all buying into Brazil. (Financial Times)

Foreign-exchange trading will more than double to $10 trillion a day on average a decade from now. (Bloomberg)

If third-quarter results from UBS and Credit Suisse really are the post-crisis normal for big, low-risk European universal banks, investors should worry about all flow houses. (Financial Times)

Mervyn King thinks there has been a massive overstatement of the wealth created by the UK's banks for two reasons. (BBC)

Guy Hands is dyslexic and dyspraxic. (NY Post)

Goldman wants the Sergey Aleynikov trial to be held in secret. (WSJ)

"We essentially have a relatively large cost base in the investment bank, and we saw revenues being very, very slow, especially in the summer months." (Bloomberg)

The secrets of BNP Paribas' success. (Economist)

Engineering degrees pay the most. (WSJ)