Wall Street’s Banks May Cut 35% of Jobs
April 10th, 2008Anyone need a used Porsche?
Via: Bloomberg:
Kenneth Moelis, the former president of UBS AG’s investment bank, said Wall Street firms may have to eliminate as much as 35 percent of employees as leveraged lending dwindles and the pace of mergers and acquisitions slows.
“The Street got staffed up to support what was a slight bubble in M&A,” Moelis, 49, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television today. “You’re going to see a significant retrenchment.”
Moelis resigned from UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank by market value, a year ago and now runs Moelis & Co., an investment banking boutique. Some of the largest financial “conglomerates” may break up as Wall Street shifts focus from lending to its clients to furnishing them with strategic advice, he said. Wall Street banks hit by mortgage losses and writedowns have cut more than 34,000 jobs in the past nine months, the most since the dot-com boom fizzled in 2001.
“They’re going to have to go back out and remember that their client is a relationship, not a counterparty,” said Moelis, who is based in Los Angeles. His clients include Yahoo! Inc., which rejected a $44.6 billion buyout bid from Microsoft Corp. in February.
