Re: MBA for Ibanking
[#permalink]
05 Aug 2008, 17:04
I just wanted to clarify something - most banks do not intend to give out offers to 100% of their summer associates. In fact, I didn't even hear that from them during their sales pitches. Most of the top banks were quite proud to say that they gave out full-time offers to 75-80% of their summer associates. They might say things like "the job is yours to lose", but really, you still have to go in and earn it.
As far as this year goes, Merrill and Citi already cut back, reducing the number of summer offers that they handed out, compared to what they said last fall and their historical numbers. This isn't a surprise, because last fall Citi and Merrill were the firms slammed the hardest (along with Bear of course), while there was relative calm at Goldman, Lehman & Morgan. Hard to say what is going on with UBS right now. They have taken massive write-downs (trailing only Citi I believe), but should be able to survive those; their real problem seems to be all the fraud and SEC violations they have been linked to. Their IB was small to begin with (asset management was huge); and if they decide to take their wealth management away from the US, or are forcibly booted, they may not have much reason to stay. I understand that morale at GS is low right now because of fairly sizeable layoffs earlier in the summer. The feeling among the people that I know there is that it was a pretty unnecessary and ruthless thing to do when, in large part, they are making lots of money. Lehman seemed to be at death's door, but has stabilized (stock is up 65%+ off lows); and its banking business has actually been picking up market share. It's been widely speculated (on a daily basis) that they may sell their asset management business and focus on growing the banking business - in which case things might not be so bad for people in IB this summer.