JPMORGAN TO AX 12K

By PAUL THARP

Last updated: 11:54 pm
February 26, 2009
Posted: 12:00 am
February 27, 2009

JPMorgan Chase plans to eliminate 12,000 jobs as it swallows failed bank Washington Mutual.

The financial giant said it expects to save about $2 billion by combining operations of the two firms, with about $1.35 billion saved in payroll alone.

Shares of JPMorgan jumped nearly 10 percent on the moves before settling at $23.05, a 6 percent rise.

Most of the cuts will come from Washington Mutual, with as many as 2,000 from JPMorgan's investment banking arm, officials said.

More detail on WaMu job cuts

More than 1,000 Washington Mutual Bank employees are losing their jobs in Irvine and Chatsworth as acquirer JPMorgan Chase & Co. cuts 9,200 positions, a company spokesman said.
New York-based JPMorgan agreed in September to pay $1.9 billion for Washington Mutual after the Seattle-based savings and loan, choking on soured home loans, became the largest U.S. banking institution ever seized by regulators.
In announcing the 9,200 job cuts Monday, Chase and Washington Mutual officials said no figures were available immediately for the Southland.
But today Washington Mutual spokesman Gary Kishner said 571 jobs would be eliminated in Irvine and 478 in Chatsworth.
The positions are primarily in back-office functions such as technology, human resources and marketing, Kishner said. JPMorgan has said it plans no closures of Washington Mutual branches in California.
About half the Southland employees whose positions were eliminated were given 60 days’ severance pay. The other half will continue to work during a transitional period but will lose their jobs by the end of next year. They will receive double pay for staying on.

JPMORGAN CUTS 9,200 AT WAMU

JPMorgan Chase & Co. said it will eliminate about 9,200 jobs at the former Washington Mutual Inc., which on Sept. 25 became the largest US bank to fail.

The cuts amount to more than 21 percent of the work force at Washington Mutual, which ended June with 43,198 employees.

Washington Mutual had been the largest US savings and loan before JPMorgan bought its banking assets for $1.9 billion in a transaction arranged by US regulators. The holding company for Seattle-based Washington Mutual later filed for bankruptcy protection.

About 4,000 of the jobs will be cut by the end of January, and another 5,200 later, JPMorgan spokesman Christine Holevas said.

The 5,200 workers will receive double their annual salaries retroactive to Oct. 1, payable in a lump sum when their employment ends, Holevas said.

Seattle will bear the brunt of the cuts, with 3,400 layoffs out of a total of 4,300 Washington Mutual employees in the city, JPMorgan said.

More Wall Street layoffs at Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has started doling out the pink slips to investment bankers due to the crawling markets and merger slump, according to Reuters.

The report says hundreds of support staff and junior-level bankers were let go, and around 25% of employees at the vice president level. Wall Street has laid off more than 60,000 since the credit crunch began. Lehman Brothers Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. laid off a large number of employees due to the ailing markets -- and in Bear's case due to a merger with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

So far there have been 4,000 dismissals at Morgan Stanley, 5,000 at Merrill Lynch & Co., 7,000 at UBS and 16,000 at Citigroup Inc., according to New York Magazine. - Maria Woehr

Cutbacks, layoffs dog Chicago financial industry

Wachovia Corp. soon will begin laying off 58 workers at 77 W. Wacker Drive as the financial-services company's securities arm continues to integrate the recently acquired A.G. Edwards, a Wachovia spokeswoman said Thursday.Wachovia is the latest in a string of financial-services firms to cut back their Chicago-area employment.In February, GE Capital Corp. announced it was laying off 50 workers at 222 N. LaSalle St. as a result of its recent acquisition of Merrill Lynch Capital.

Similarly, Bank of America Corp. has said it plans to cut 2,500 jobs in Illinois in 2008 and 2009 in the wake of its purchase in October of LaSalle Bank, Chicago's No. 2 bank. In March, BofA alerted the state that 201 workers at a call center at 79 W. Monroe St. will lose their jobs starting in October.

In late February, Morgan Stanley Credit Corp., which originates prime mortgages, laid off 70 workers in Vernon Hills due to deterioration in the real estate market.The layoffs occurred at 75 N. Fairway Drive—the same location where, only a month earlier, Washington Mutual had cut 75 workers at a home-loan back-office operation.In March, JPMorgan Chase eliminated 59 jobs in a Westmont operation that handled subprime brokered mortgages. Chase isn't in that business anymore.
Last month in Schaumburg, First Franklin closed an office, idling 81 workers. That move came two months after its parent, Merrill Lynch, said it was discontinuing mortgage origination at First Franklin and exploring the sale of First Franklin's mortgage servicing unit.

LaSalle fallout:Harris Bank's commercial middle-market banking group has added more new clients through the first seven months of its fiscal year than it did during the entire previous year, Ray Whitacre, senior vice president of the group, said recently.New clients include Westside Mechanical, which banked at LaSalle until its recent purchase by BofA."We could see there were going to be big changes with the acquisition," Westside owner Jim Reiss said."When you think of business banking in Chicago, it's LaSalle, Harris or FifthThird," he said. "Harris came up with the best solution."Harris provided a $9 million credit facility, handles Westside's business banking and provided Reiss his acquisition financing to purchase Westside, which has about $45 million in annual sales. The Fifth Third banker who pitched Reiss now works for Harris. "Some attrition can be expected during a transition, but we're excited about the momentum we're building in Chicago," said Mark Sander, a BofA senior vice president who oversees the Midwest commercial and industrial banking unit, which has 10,000 customers. "We've been gaining local market share," adding more than $700 million in C&I loans since year's end.

byerak@tribune.com

JPMorgan: Viva* Los Layoffs

It seems like all we ever hear about is what a nice guy Jamie Dimon is, and how he's a "giant among midgets" and his souvlaki is out of this world, but the direction he's taking Bearpont Morgan Chase** is deeply disturbing and very much brings his judgment into question.


Not two weeks ago JPMorgan's head of Latin American Credit, along with four MD's and one ED were laid off for reasons related to "cost cutting and expenses." Today we're told that a JPM director paid a visit to 383 Madison this morning to fire all but two analysts from Bear's Latam Research division, telling the peasants, "As you probably realize, we cannot take you on and as you may or may not be aware, JPMorgan decided to keep the headcount the same as before the merger. So now, you are free to look for other jobs." Obviously we knew that there would be (severance-saddled) victims in this whole thing but the fact that Jamie Dimon can't spare a few pesos to keep the group which inspired "Project Awesome" (the fictional Latam division of the fictional JS Spencer bank which spent most of its time chilling in Cabo with the odd Brazilian mention in Dana Vachon's Mergers and Acquisitions) fully intact is a hard pill to swallow and quite nearly criminal. To Dimon's credit, however, he apparently was instrumental in coming up with the line, "You are free to look for other jobs," which was inspired. (Especially after he asked everyone to stay put for the last several months and requested that other banks hold off on hiring Bear employees until he could decide who would be getting fired.)


*It's funnier than "vivan."
**Not yet official, just in the hopper. Also under consideration: JPMorgan Cayne, the reasoning being that "this whole thing would never have happened without JC's inspired management of Bear."

Layoff Watch: JPMorgan

"Believe it, don't, whatever, it's a three-day weekend. Supposedly Bearpont Morgan Chase has cut 50 percent of first year analysts and 50 percent of IBD entirely. Severance is 2.5 months salary plus full bonus given out in July." [Dealbreaker]

Tally for April layoff notices by NJ employers: 2,577 jobs

by The Star-Ledger Business Desk
Tuesday May 06, 2008, 12:27 PM

The NJ Department of Labor has posted last month's listings for upcoming job layoffs on its website, and it's not a pretty picture.

The monthly total comes to 2,577 jobs cuts, with more than half coming from two hospitals slated to close, Columbus Hospital in Newark and Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center in Plainfield. Financial services firm JPMorgan Chase and logistics company Hapag-Lloyd also make appearances.

Under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, employers are required to give 60 days notice of mass layoffs at worksites. Most of the notices from April are for layoffs that will take place in June.

JPMorgan to Layoff Employees in Fixed Income Units, Person Says

By Elizabeth Hester

Oct. 11 (Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co., the third- largest U.S. bank, is eliminating as much as 10 percent of the jobs in groups that financed leveraged buyouts and packaged debt into securities, a person familiar with the situation said.

The two units are part of the New York-based firm's investment banking division, which employed 25,356 people as of June 30, according to the company's quarterly report.

``We are making modest staff reductions in areas where we expect lower volumes going forward, including leveraged finance and structured credit,'' spokesman Brian Marchiony said.

JPMorgan is following UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group, Switzerland's two largest banks, which said this month they would eliminate 1,820 jobs after a global credit market contraction led investors to shun high-risk, high-yield debt. Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein estimated in an Oct. 5 report that JPMorgan, led by Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon, may have to write down leveraged loan and mortgage-related holdings by about $2 billion.

``The boom times are over and they're taking actions to get out in front of the numbers,'' said John Challenger, chief executive officer of Chicago job placement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas. ``Jamie Dimon doesn't defer his actions and he's quick to make changes when results aren't there.''

In the first nine months of the year, JPMorgan was the third-largest underwriter of structured debt such as asset-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and residential and commercial mortgage bonds, according to Asset-Backed Alert.

Credit Suisse, UBS

The bank sold $134 billion of the debt, about $1 billion less than New York-based Citigroup Inc. and within $400 million of Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG, the industry newsletter said.

Credit Suisse said Oct. 2 it would cut about 170 jobs in its investment banking unit, about half in fixed-income. Earlier, the firm eliminated 150 positions from its mortgage-backed securities department.

UBS is shedding 1,500 jobs after a third-quarter loss, including about 70 U.S. employees who work with mortgage-backed, asset-backed and collateralized debt obligations.

JPMorgan shares fell 25 cents to $46.66 today in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They're down 3.4 percent this year. The firm is slated to report quarterly earnings Oct. 17.

To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Hester in New York at ehester@bloomberg.net .
Last Updated: October 11, 2007 17:30 EDT


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