Lunchtime Links: IT'S NOT THAT BAD - Bank of America has only cut 3% of its staff in global equities
What with all the doom and depression about redundancies, it's worth remembering that things are not really that bad.
Yes, Lloyds is cutting 15,000 people, but it doesn't do much in wholesale banking anyway and is making concomitant noises about building up in 'fixed income.' Yes, Goldman Sachs is cutting 230 jobs in New York (between September 26th and March 31st), but that's less than 1% of the total number of people it employs. Yes, HSBC is cutting 700 jobs in the UK, but only 100 are in Canary Wharf, where it employs several thousand people in total.
And yes, Bank of America has cut 60 people in global equities, but it employs 2,300 people in global equities altogether.
IT IS NOT THAT BAD.
There's a reason for this. As Breaking Views pointed out recently, banks cut heavily in 2009 and were forced to hire heavily in 2010. They don't want to make big cuts again in 2011, unless they're forced to.
It's ok. Prince Andrew will save the UK as a financial centre. ( Telegraph )
Kenichi Watanabe, CEO of Nomura, has had his salary cut by 42%. ( Bloomberg )
Asia now awards a quarter of all engineering PhDs - almost as many as the EU and the USA put together. (CityAm )
