Hi all

Do you think todays annoucememnt on covid will make any difference to employers who are preparing cuts ??

I work for one of the big swiss banks and I wonder if they will stop cost cutting because of the covid news today???

Basically do you think they will be embarrassed to fire people to cut costs for the bad publicity or is that not the way it works in swisstzerland

I doubt it makes any difference.

They are banks, listed on the stock market. On what planet do you live?

Really? You work in one of the big banks and don't know about how much credit suisse cared about closing several NAB offices and firing employees?

i really dont - if you can share the story link I can read it - Is this recent???

Banks which have a return below their cost of capital, terrible businesses & I would never invest in one. High gearing makes the return look acceptable but at what risk? UBS is capitalised at about 1/3 of it's value the day the merged with SBC about 23 years ago.

I doubt, they are interested in making money.

Banking is a commodity industry these days, so no cost cutting is not going to stop and once that has run it’s course it will be followed by a serious of consolidations. There is a lot more job losses on the way no matter what the virus does.

1. No, if anything quite the opposite

2. The Swiss banks haven't really cut costs relative to their industry, particularly the big ones who seem incapable of finding economies of scale which should have made them really competitive.

3. That's not the way it works in life, your location in Switzerland is irrelevant.

Wasn't there another thread just about this subject this week? Mods, perhaps you can join them?

Hsbc and some other Uk banks stopped cost cutting earlier on this year to prevent embarrassment. That’s why I asked

They may have paused, but it was probably more due to uncertainty than embarrassment.

The latest news:

Aug 4, 2020 — HSBC will accelerate its major cost reduction programme to overhaul the global markets and banking division and cut around 35,000 jobs, following a temporary suspension due to the coronavirus pandemic.

I worked in the City back in the 80s, when everything crashed it was pretty normal to hear about banks firing 3 or 400 people first thing in the morning. You just took a deep breath and were glad it wasn't you that time round. My turn came in 1991, about 6 months before the Japanese bank I worked in was hit by a major scandal involving insider trading and the Yakuza
I was lucky as I'd gone to work for another bank by then, the people made redundant immediately after the scandal found it very difficult to get hired and many left the City.

tbh I've not heard of any company doing this out of goodwill. In Italy they simply banned firing people when the first wave came lol
and now it's been pushed out to the end of january at least.

In Switzerland plenty of companies are firing. But most of those that do already had structural or existential problems before, corona just pushed them over the edge. I have yet to see a healthy company in a sector that has a chance in switzerland go belly up, if they weren't targeted directly by the measures.
Banks are surely going to go on firing as there is still quite some adjusting to do in this country.