JPMorgan Chase & Co. to Layoff 20

The odds are good that if you do any kind of investing that you have at least heard the name JPMorgan Chase & Co. After all they are not only a sizable firm, but in the United States at least, the largest firm in terms of its sheer amount of assets. These days even the largest banks, with the biggest cash reserves on hand and billions in assets, seem to be continuing to trim back on their workforces in order to save as much in the way of the staffing budget as they can and to maximize what it can get it terms of the quarterly profits.

This the time the bank is getting ready to get rid of about 20 jobs in its investment banking firm division. While workers on this side of the pond can breathe a sigh of relief our friends under the Union Jack have some more reason to be nervous. All of the cuts in this round of layoffs are expected to come from the bank’s London office. On the bright side this set of layoffs is both small in absolute terms and in the relative percentage of the people in the office. JPMorgan Chase & Co. currently employs about 8,000 people in the city of London currently.

It in important to know that, at least for the time being, the cuts are not being officially announced by the public. The news of the layoffs came from a source that is close to the company’s management team, who did not wish to be identified by the reporter for a national news publication, to whom he or she spoke initially. From there the information has caused a lot of speculation. The one thing the source was very clear about was that the cuts are in no related to the recent loss of about $2 billion that the company suffered.  This makes perfect sense when you consider that there is no way that cutting back on just 20 jobs could ever make up for a short fall of that magnitude.

The cuts are more likely related to the increasing cost of regulation on the banking industry and the inability to sell bonds and make new loans in the current crisis. For now since a number of problems are centered on the issues in Europe it makes sense that larger banks would choose to cut back from their offices in the impacted area. These cuts are, of course, not the only ones that the company has made in the last couple of years and the workers in US banks have taken their fair share of job cuts in the name of the bottom line in recent years.

Interestingly enough as early as 2010 the company was taking a much more optimistic look at the economy and even made some modest attempts at expansion. In the city of Atlanta the bank had plans, “…to open 10 new Chase branches throughout the northern Atlanta metropolitan area by the end of 2010, with another 35 coming by the end of 2012.  Construction is already under way on eight of the initial ten and the company predicts adding some 350 jobs over the course of the next two to three years.”