Deutsche Bank axes whole teams in Asia-Pacific as job cuts begin | Hacker News Reader

Deutsche Bank axes whole teams in Asia-Pacific as job cuts begin

reuters.com

95 pointsrealshadow26 comments

Matt Levine was saying last week that everybody at DB has been expecting these cuts for ages: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2019-07-02/it...

Thanks for posting this, and I might have to start reading more of Matt Levine.

However, I don't know where you get "ages" from. He never mentions how long this has been going on. In fact I read it more as a news story where he is reporting a more recent development.

Edit: He does say "Executives in New York have for more than a year worked under the cloud of whether the U.S. operation would be sold, gutted or spun off.", but executives tend to try to hide negative truths from the majority of employees for as long as possible.

Matt Levine is my favourite writer at the moment. I love his simple, whimsical style.

I know someone who used to work there and their department was continually being downsized with rumours circling of complete shutdown even 3 years ago.

Will they also be axing the people involved in money laundering?

I'm curious how they are going to unwind the massive derivative portfolio...

I'm not sure if there are enough oysters to be caught and cocktails to be mixed for all those budding oyster fishermen and barkeepers - I mean seriously those bankers are quite useless anywhere outside their finance bubble.

Anyway, strip clubs and coke dealers are already worried about customers breaking away. [1]

Source:

1: https://www.der-postillon.com/2019/07/deutsche-bank-18000.ht...

Im really interested how this will evolve. DBank has alot of assets in other banks in my country. Curious what it means for them. Should I jump the ship and switch ?

As a customer or employee?

As a customer

Good.

Please don't do this here.

Well, if ice shipment companies get out of business because freezers are invented, can't we celebrate progress?

Then substantiate the reasons for the celebration while giving context and facts. A post containing just "Good." is vague, uninspiring, unenlightening. It's noise.

I-banking and trading divisions are getting gutted. One would think there are money to be made there and most banks aren’t following suit. Sounds like leadership failure to me.

There's money to be made there, and they made a lot of money, so much that the company stopped caring about the other divisions - until they didn't, and it started to cost them tons of money in lawsuits.

Yes, a different management approach might have avoided the lawsuits and everything, but apparently this level of risk taking is not in the DNA of the bank and so they stop doing that.

In my opinion restricting themselves to the part of the business they understand to get back to a clean slate is one of the smartest ideas they had in the last ~20 years.

It’s sort of weird to see this stuff on HN. There’s another top article atm on Japan machine orders. These articles are clickbait noise with zero informational value - or worse.

Deutsche employs tens of thousands of software engineers. I think it's relevant.

Hate me for this but: It's ok.

We don't need all those bankers and if we'd manage to manage our finances better as a world we wouldn't even need those jobs and a lot of these institutions.

>if we'd manage to manage our finances better

Pray tell, what does this mean?

This is happening while most anticipate AI taking jobs. I wonder how this will turn out as more jobs are being automated with human-assisted downsizing

This is nothing to do with AI. It's to do with Deutsche's shady accounting and refusal to take government money during the global financial crisis.

So I've become pretty cynical about companies announcing layoffs. In the short term, it'll boost the stock and make the CEO look good as a result. The net effect will be:

- A certain number of people who leave or retire won't be replaced

- Some workers will get relocated geographically and/or within the company's business units such that they'll be counted as a layoff and a new hire

- New hiring won't stop

- The company will use layoffs as a means of getting rid of a number of workers that would otherwise be legally problematic to get rid of (eg older or pregnant workers)

- Some smaller teams, projects or divisions will be sold off to other companies

Hiring is near constant. Layoffs happen in bursts. Combine this with natural attrition and not much has changed. Overall staffing levels will continue trending downward slightly with increased automation. Business as usual.

your comment has no relation to what is happening at DB - they're writing down $73 billion in assets and exiting businesses they tried to expand into

It's entirely relevant. When I said layoffs happen in bursts, what do you think that means? It means, for a time, you stop doing something you used to do. But as time goes on you'll find new things to do. Some of those will hopefully work out. Others won't. Rinse and repeat.

For the avoidance of doubt, they are not writing down $73 billions of assets, that would wipe out their whole capital base. They intend to sell or roll off $73 billions worth of RWAs.

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