Morgan Stanley's guide to the best banking jobs in every scenario between now and 2027

If you don't work in quantitative fixed income trading, but you do want to find yourself in a sunny situation during the next few years, Morgan Stanley and Oliver Wyman have some high level tips in their newly released annual "Bluepaper".

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The future is, needless to say, not certain, and Morgan Stanley and Oliver Wyman aren't being prescriptive in their prognostications. Instead, as per the chart below, they have three scenarios: a soft landing, a bumpy landing, and deglobalisation.

These are defined as follows:

Soft landing: gradual fall in inflation, controlled fall in rates, steady economic growth, slight decline in macro volatility, rising asset prices, no major geopolitical dislocations 

Bumpy landing: faltering growth, inflation reaches target, aggressive rate cuts, equities market slows, elevated rates, deteriorating credit 

Deglobalisation: Stringent tariffs; high levels of commodities, FX and rates volatility, supply chain dislocations; sticky inflation; rates decline slowly  

Under each scenario, Morgan Stanley and Oliver Wyman think revenue growth by investment banking business areas will differ. However, some businesses do relatively well under all scenarios and some businesses always do badly. The chart below shows which.

Source: Morgan Stanley/Oliver Wyman 

The sweet spots in all versions of the near future are the investment banking division (M&A and equity and debt capital markets) where revenues are expected to grow in almost every year and in almost every scenario. This echoes today's verdict by Deutsche Bank analysts, who declared that the "corporate finance complex is recovering" after two slow years. 

If you don't work in M&A or equity and debt capital markets, you might want to work in "spread" products, AKA traded credit products. Here, revenues are also expected to be comparatively strong in every situation except a bumpy landing in 2025, when rates are presumably hiked aggressively. 

By comparison, macro (FX and rates) traders have had a hard this year and are expected to continue having hard years under every scenario, excepting a brief respite in 2025.

And transaction banking, formerly the corporate banking cash cow of big investment banks everywhere, is no longer to be relied upon. Transaction banking revenues fell this year, and Morgan Stanley and Oliver Wyman think they'll keep on falling through to 2027. 

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