Morgan Stanley Plans to Cut 2,000 Workers, Partly Due to AI | Entrepreneur

Morgan Stanley is preparing to reduce its 80,000-person workforce by 2,000 employees later this month, marking the bank’s first significant round of layoffs since CEO Ted Pick took over in January 2024.

The workforce reduction will affect divisions across Morgan Stanley, except for its 15,000 financial advisers, per Bloomberg. The cuts are meant to keep costs down as executives face low attrition, or a low rate of employees leaving an organization through resignations, terminations, or retirements.

Some employees impacted by the layoffs will be let go due to performance issues, while others will be cut because AI and automation have replaced their roles within the bank. A source told Bloomberg that the bank expects to make more job reductions due to AI in the coming years.

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How Banks Are Losing Clients to Their Own Employees | Bloomberg

Morgan Stanley could do little but watch as a team of advisers overseeing $2.2 billion in assets quit last month to start their own shop, the latest in a string of departures that have shifted billions of dollars in assets away from big Wall Street banks.

After months of secret and meticulous planning, 13 employees in Wichita, Kansas, left on a Friday with phone numbers and e-mail addresses for 800 clients, and then spent a frantic weekend on the phone trying to get them to switch to their upstart. It all depended on a gift from Morgan Stanley: Years earlier, the bank had signed away its right to sue.

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Public Pensions Are Not The Whole Problem | ZeroHedge

While it’s the latest new thing to vilify public employees and their pensions, this little known and understood threat is doing just as much damage:

In 2002 a little-known but powerful state agency in California and Wall Street titans Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and Ambac consummated one of the biggest deals to date involving … an “interest rate swap.” A year later the executive director of the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Steve Heminger, proudly described these historic deals to a visiting contingent of Atlanta policymakers as a model to be emulated.

Because of the economic collapse, and the decline of interest rates in 2008 to virtually zero, the MTA has been forced to pay the amazing sum of $658 million in net swap payments so far.

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Lowering interest rates to zero isn’t Fed policy, it’s Wall Street policy – Ed.