Bank of America cut 7,500 jobs and no one noticed
When the banking job cuts of 2023 are reflected upon by generations to come, the cuts at Bank of America are unlikely to be remembered. It's Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Citi that have made the most noise about trimming heads in 2023. But it's Bank of America that has quietly cut the most.
In the first half of 2023, Credit Suisse cut just over 4,000 people. Between January and the end of September 2023, Goldman Sachs cut 3,200 people. Citi cut 2,000. Morgan Stanley said it wascutting 3,000 people, but its net headcount only appears to have dropped by 1,700.
Bank of America? Bank of America cut 5,000 people, or actually 7,500 people when you consider that it also hired 2,500 students as per the chart below.
Source: Bank of America
At its peak, in early 2023 Bank of America had 218,000 people. Now it has 213,000, despite adding 2,500 campus hires. "Our headcount is now down over 7,000 FTEs from a peak in January, even with the addition of 2,500 college grads this fall," declared BofA chief executive Brian Moynihan yesterday.
In fact, Bank of America may have cut even more than 7,500 people given that it's also been recruiting heavily in fixed income sales and trading in Europe.
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Who were these people that were let go? And how come no one noticed? A few BofA exits were reported: a small number of London investment bankers were cut in June; 40 bankers were cut in Asia in May; a head of equity derivatives trading disappeared in August. In the banking and markets businesses, though, it's all been very low key — suggesting that most of the cuts came in the more populous retail bank and elsewhere.
The cuts have also been beneath the radar because,
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