eFinancialCareers

The ranks of Wall Street's top leveraged-buyout bankers are thinning, and not only due to layoffs. With leveraged deal volume running at a third last year's pace, some of the sector's leading names have left bulge-bracket employers or announced plans to depart. They include heads or co-heads of leveraged finance at Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank and a co-head of high-yield and loan sales at Citigroup, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. Spokesmen... Read more

JPMorgan Chase hired a top Washington lobbyist to head up government relations efforts in the U.S. and worldwide. The bank named Peter Scher, a former U.S. trade negotiator and senior aide to at least two U.S. senators, as executive vice president of global government relations and public policy, effective June 16. He'll oversee state, federal and international government relations, and will join the bank's executive committee. Currently, Scher is the managing partner... Read more

Lehman Brothers realigned its efforts to help distressed corporate clients restructure their finances, by tying together formerly separate teams within the investment banking and fixed income areas. Lehman's new restructuring and finance group is led by Mark J. Shapiro, a managing director who formerly led the bank's restructuring team, according to the New York Times DealBook blog. Others who will be linked to the group include Jim Seery, the head of... Read more

JPMorgan reportedly has begun slashing as much as 20 percent of its investment banking work force. "People at the firm say at least 200 executives were laid off over the past two days - a move unrelated to the firm's recent purchase of Bear Stearns," CNBC reported. A company spokeswoman told the network that JPMorgan employs "as many as" 1,000 executives within its investment banking unit. CNBC's story apparently misuses the... Read more

Lehman Brothers announced its second top-level Middle East appointment in a month, naming Philip Lynch as chief executive officer for the Middle East and North Africa. Lynch, who co-led Lehman's equities business in Europe and the Middle East, will relocate from London to Dubai. The other equities co-head, Rachid Bouzouba, was named sole head of equities for Europe and the Middle East. The bank's current Middle East CEO, Jameel Akhrass,... Read more

In the latest relocation of an important banking leadership post to Asia, Credit Suisse is moving the head of its global financial institutions group from New York to Hong Kong. Vikram Gandhi will move to Hong Kong this summer and will remain head of the global financial institutions group, FinanceAsia reported. "Gandhi will continue to oversee business and maintain key client relationships in the Americas but is expected to devote a... Read more

Credit Suisse said it hired Garry Bullock as head of global operations for its investment bank division. Bullock's immediate previous employer and role weren't identified in the announcement, but he worked at Morgan Stanley and UBS over the past 22 years. At UBS, at different times he served as global gead of investment bank operations, and global gead of investment bank operations and information technology. He has worked in both... Read more

A revised economic analysis by a New York City agency forecasts that the city's financial services job losses will total 33,300 from late 2007 through mid-2009 – including 17,300 jobs in the more narrowly defined "securities" industry. Those numbers are dwarfed by the amount of job cuts already announced by Wall Street and big European banks, which exceed 60,000. They're also well below the 41,300 New York City jobs erased by... Read more

Media reports this week indicate Lehman Brothers recently began laying off an estimated 1,400 people or about 5 percent of its worldwide work force. The reduction appears come on top of a reduction of identical proportions the firm reportedly carried out in March. The March reports of a mass layoff from Lehman were never officially confirmed. The latest round of job cuts "are expected to affect all divisions of the company... Read more

When it comes to working with search firms, "when and if" are just as important as "how." Retained search firms are appropriate vehicles for candidates seeking a "career lateral" - a position whose responsibilities and pay are similar to the job they currently have, says Ann S. Boland, an executive recruiter in the Washington, D.C., area. However, if you've previously performed the role but aren't doing so currently, or if you... Read more

Some 1,500 employees or 3 percent of the worldwide work force of the newly merged Thomson Reuters Corp. reportedly are about to lose their jobs as a result of the combination. The job cuts include 650 from the company's content, technology and operations division, and 140 journalists located primarily in Europe, according to separate internal memos cited in a Reuters news story. An Associated Press story pegged the total number of jobs... Read more

Some of the biggest banks are melding their equity and debt origination teams. While shaking up reporting lines and giving rise to promotions, the moves thus far don't seem to alter headcounts in the affected departments, according to press reports. Citigroup named co-heads of capital markets origination for several geographic regions, Financial News reported this week, citing an internal memo. Both UBS and JPMorgan also recently created integrated capital markets divisions,... Read more

JPMorgan Chase is conducting an outplacement effort on an unprecedented scale, as its chief executive and an in-house team reportedly approach hundreds of companies about hiring some 5,000 Bear Stearns workers who will become casualties of the banks' pending combination. The campaign could become a template for how both JPMorgan and the rest of Wall Street will manage the impact of future major mergers and layoffs, the Financial Times reports in... Read more

Dumpsters suddenly show up outside your office. Your corporate email stops working. A customer mentions that you're being replaced. The boss calls with bad news while you're recovering from surgery. These are among the practices banks resort to these days to inform individual human resources that they are no longer considered resources. As Wall Street firms downsize in a series of waves, the New York Times reports that managements are concealing... Read more

Buyout kingpin Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. is on the prowl for people who know how to select and manage infrastructure investments. KKR hired Lazard's global infrastructure chief George Bilicic to lead the new initiative, the private equity firm said in a press release Friday. In addition, "KKR is building an investment team to focus specifically on global infrastructure opportunities and will work with Mr. Bilicic to identify highly experienced investment... Read more

Would you call a prospective employer 63 times if your calls weren't picked up or returned? How about 24 times over a two-year period? If you fear being that persistent will cost you an opportunity, you're in for a shock. In at least two instances cited by career experts recently, candidates who did not persist to that degree would have lost opportunities. "I have a client who called an employer contact 63... Read more

UBS realigned its risk control function, hired an investment bank chief risk officer from Morgan Stanley, moved its global fixed-income chief out of the role he occupied for less than a year and created a new post to oversee proprietary trading. The biggest Swiss bank, which last week announced plans to eliminate 2,600 investment bank jobs and 5,500 slots company-wide, said it's melding formerly distinct market risk and credit risk functions... Read more

If you think Wall Street was stingy at bonus time last year, brace yourself: 2008 is on track to be far worse, according to a top compensation consultant's latest soundings of its blue-chip client base. Johnson Associates is projecting smaller departmental bonus pools this year across each of the 12 business areas examined in its first-quarter compensation trends report. Company wide average bonuses are seen shrinking between 15 percent and 35... Read more