Beyond the 1,000 German bank Hypo Real Estate is laying off, job cuts in the financial services sector appear to have officially slowed. Even a cursory look at the Layoff Tracker blog finds fewer financial services firings in recent weeks. The last staff reduction at a major bank was 81 jobs lost in the Tampa, Fla., office of Bank of America, and that was part of the much larger staff reduction of 30,000 to 35,000 positions the bank announced last year after it acquired (with all the glee of three-year-old taking medicine) Merrill Lynch.
Generally, it is FIFO for financial services when it comes to recessions. Clearly, banking was “first in” this recession; could this slowdown in layoffs be a sign of the banking industry’s “first out”?