Wall Street Woes: Morgan Stanley Cuts 1,600 Jobs

By: EW News Desk Team   Date: 16 December 2011

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EW News Desk Team

Always on the look out for the latest news to monitor the state of the world economy.

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16 December 2011

As the banking sector continues to reel from the trauma of the financial crisis, 1,600 employees at Morgan Stanley will lose their jobs in the first quarter of the coming year.

According to Morgan Stanley, the cuts will affect 2.6 percent of its 62,648 strong global headcount. Bank spokesperson Mark Lake said that the cuts will occur globally and will include analyst, associate, vice president, executive director and managing director levels.

Last week, Citigroup announced it would eliminate 4,500 jobs, or 1.5 percent of its global headcount of 267,000 headcount.

Related: Citigroup to incur $400 million cost to cut 4,500 jobs

Related: Citigroup pays US$285 million to settle fraud charges

Swiss lender UBS also has told investors it will downsize its investment bank to 16,000 people by 2016 from the current 18,000 as the bank tries to reduce its exposure to risk.

In September, Bank of America Corp said it would cut 30,000 jobs over the next few years.

Related: Despite a US$2.3 billion trading scandal, UBS sees profit for Q3

Reuters commented that these “cuts come as banks see their profitability sink amid the weak global economy and European debt crisis. Clients are holding back on trading and dealmaking activity until markets become less volatile. At the same time, the value of securities banks hold for investments, clients or market-making purposes has declined, further hitting the bottom line.”

As more information of the Morgan Stanley downsize is made clear, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Bank is redeploying certain Singapore-based roles supporting its finance and operations divisions, including shifting product control jobs to India, and some management-reporting roles to Hungary, the people said.

The move is part of the firm's strategy to raise business efficiencies and cut costs, they said.

"Singapore is getting more expensive partly due to a stronger currency. It's getting close to Hong Kong in terms of costs, so it doesn't make sense to keep those functions here," one of the people said.

 


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