US bank Citigroup Inc has cut between 200 and 300 additional jobs, most in the global markets business, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
Some of the employees were fired, while others left voluntarily. Among them was Steve Prince, the younger brother of former chief executive Charles Prince, according to the newspaper.
Steve Prince’s LinkedIn profile says he is a senior vice president for marketing and advertising.
The cuts account for about 2 percent of the global markets business, it added, citing a person familiar with the matter.
Citigroup refused to comment on the report.
“We continue to tightly manage expenses, making targeted headcount reductions in light of current market conditions,” spokeswoman Danielle Romero-Apsilos said in a statement.
“At the same time, we are adding some talent strategically, leveraging our unique global footprint to serve our clients,” the statement added.
The layoffs come as Citigroup cuts expenses in its business units as the banking industry adjusts to new regulation and loan demand.
On Friday last week, JPMorgan reported that trading revenue dropped 17 percent in the first quarter of the year, a trend Citigroup has said it could follow. Late last year, Citigroup had 251,000 employees, a far cry from its 323,000 employees in late 2008 at the height of the financial crisis.
Spurred into action by falling revenue, mounting losses and the need to convince regulators that they are no longer “too big to fail,” banks across the globe have radically constrained their staff levels since the 2008 collapse of US bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc sparked the financial crisis.
Last year, the tide of bad news began to turn for European banks, which are among the region’s largest employers. Across the continent, the 30 largest banks by market value cut staff by 80,000 last year, calculations based on their year-end statements showed.
Recruitment consultants say that workers’ hopes for a turnaround this year could be misplaced, which is bad news for countries like Spain where tens of thousands of bank layoffs have helped drive unemployment to 26 percent.
However, while painful for the people who have lost their jobs, the reduction of large banks’ workforces through a combination of asset sales and redundancies means banks will not have as big an effect on overall employment in future crises.
The most dramatic of last year’s job cuts came from major restructurings, such as Spain’s Bankia SA which shed 23 percent of its workforce to help meet the conditions of its 41 billion euro (US$56.9 billion) European rescue.
Italy’s Unicredit SpA, which reduced the highest number of staff, 8,490, said in its annual report that some of the reductions were the result of a project to outsource IT functions to joint ventures.
Belgium’s KBC Groep NV cited asset sales as a major reason for its 7,938 reduction in headcount, 22 percent of its workforce. Spain’s BBVA SA also cited asset sales as the driver of its 6,547 reduction in staff, or 23 percent of staff, which came in a year when the bank sold operations in Latin America.
At Bank of Ireland, where a 6.3 percent fall in staff was the fifth-largest in the region, a redundancy program was the main reason.
Routine streamlining continued last year. HSBC PLC, the biggest employer in the pack, cut headcount by 6,525, or 2.5 percent of its global total.
The pace of staff reductions approximately halved last year and most banks are now coming to the end of disposals and cutbacks agreed during the crisis.
However, upcoming EU-wide tests on whether banks need to hold bigger capital cushions could trigger another wave of asset sales and cuts.
Only three of the banks — Barclays PLC, Handelsbanken AB and Deutsche Bank AG — added jobs last year, and those totaled less than 770.
However, banks are hiring in a few areas, with some recruiters citing rises in specialist compliance roles such as anti-money laundering, cybersecurity and internal audit, as lenders have to deal with increasing demands from regulators determined to avoid a repeat of the crisis.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
US CONSCULTANT: The US Department of Commerce’s Ursula Burns is a rarely seen US government consultant to be put forward to sit on the board, nominated as an independent director Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday nominated 10 candidates for its new board of directors, including Ursula Burns from the US Department of Commerce. It is rare that TSMC has nominated a US government consultant to sit on its board. Burns was nominated as one of seven independent directors. She is vice chair of the department’s Advisory Council on Supply Chain Competitiveness. Burns is to stand for election at TSMC’s annual shareholders’ meeting on June 4 along with the rest of the candidates. TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) was not on the list after in December last