Round 2 of BB job cuts coming?

Lots of rumours that there will be 3k job cuts at MS by the end of the month. Eg. Asia reuters are saying yesterday that 7% of their ibd workforce may be sliced

That is 3k on MS's 82k employees and wealth management is going fine for them so it is probably 5-7% of the rest of the business, and IBD will probably fall a big chunk of the hammer blow I can only imagine

Is this the start of round 2 across the BBs? Will there be a round 3?

9 Comments
 

Don’t know where OP works, but job cuts in Asia is massive.

For Hong Kong, Top BBs ibd is letting people go nearly every week since last year, and juniors apparently are not protected at all.

It’s not only about headcount but also salaries, some banks reduce the pay by ~50% (or even 70%), which is close to those Chinese sweatshops.

And some boutiques are leaving China, closed the office there.

Everything in apac has been done silently for a few months, this news is just to confirm/aggravate the sad situation.

 

And the exits are garbage for those who were laid off in HK. Heard some colleagues only received offers with 70% paycut such as bb ibd associate moving to MM PE as analyst 1 (5.5k usd a month) and associate 1 or a2 who moved to chinese banks with only 5k usd a month for associate and 2.5k a month for analyst.

These chinese banks were paying 2x of these just 1 year ago but for political reason and supply reason, they just decided to lowball everyone now. There are like 200+ bankers across the street looking for ~20-30 openings. I bet most of them will just leave the industry ultimately and restart with a trajectory that is worse than their peers who pursued average jobs out of uni

Corp dev exits are non-existent and it is a buyers' market in HK for these mom and pop PEs or chinese banks. Companies are paying with packages less than big 4 auditors with equivalent experiences in HK, crazy.

 

Thanks for the more detailed info, this is horrible...

Guess for China institutions, the political thing just helps them happily justify their approaches to pay.

I myself did not manage to get a return offer in Hong Kong, see many great peers are also just left out. Now have to go to a master program under expectations, with the China applicants pool being also ever extremely competitive. Today options for finance work, study or other kinda work are all facing fierce competition with so scarce resources, and have been desperately trying to figure out a solution (work/intern or do a subpar master) but sadly no answer.

After the amateur experience in banking, it's hard to just layback and go work in other functions, but those seniors you mentioned definitely have a 100x harder time than me.

 

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