Job cuts at the largest US banks this year are on course to surpass 11,000 as Wall Street contends with the worst recruitment market since the financial crisis following a pandemic-era hiring binge.
Citigroup this week became the latest big US bank to announce significant job cuts, telling investors that it planned to complete 5,000 redundancies by the end of the second quarter, mostly in investment banking and trading. That followed cuts affecting thousands of bankers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
The job cuts come as executives try to unwind a recruitment spree that started as the economy rebounded in the aftermath of Covid-19. Banks dramatically increased their headcounts to cope with a deals and trading boom at a time when working from home was scrambling traditional ways of doing business.