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HSBC
HSBC Employee Would Like To Congratulate Management For “Coming Up With A New Way To Screw Employees”
By Bess LevinIn 10,000 words:
A bank that really takes pleasure in proudly advertising any award it gets, howsoever ludicrous the honour, is HSBC. One honour it’d loath to advertise, but unarguably deserves the most is the bank that most royally screws its employees. It is no secret that HSBC’s senior management gets paid ridiculous amount of compensation. What however is not well known is how shoddily the junior and middle level staff is paid. One rather remarkable fact is that on parameters like average employee salary and percentage of profits paid as staff compensation, HSBC is in line with the best paying investment banks. However, the salaries of its junior-middle level staff are right there at the bottom of the industry. Their loss is “senior management’s” gain, the bureaucrats who spend most of their time strategising and talking vision.
Henrietta Leung slaved away for nine years at HSBC, taking home 120,000 pounds annually for 16-hour work days. Then she did the same for Credit Suisse. All the while she knew something was missing but couldn’t justifiably give up the money. Then the financial crisis and her ensuing layoff from the Swiss Bank did for her what she couldn’t do for herself: forced her to figure out what makes Henrietta tick. She found that tick was a) being naked and b) doing squat thrusts, sometimes simultaneously. Read more »
So much so, that it’s selling its headquarters and just about every piece of real-estate it owns.
First to go was its New York headquarters on Fifth Avenue, sold last month to an Israeli. Now, HSBC is parting ways (again) with its London headquarters in Canary Wharf, agreeing to sell to South Korea’s National Pension Service.
The bank is still shopping its Hong Kong and Paris buildings.
The City is not a happy place today: The U.K.’s two biggest banks both reported lower earnings thanks to the credit crisis, while Lloyds Banking Group announced a new round of job cuts.
First, Barclays and HSBC. The former said its third-quarter profit fell by half. Worse, its profit was actually lower than its write-downs and impairment charges, which doubled to £1.4 billion.
The latter was a little bit more coy, but the news was worse. HSBC said its third-quarter performance was lower than a year earlier, but didn’t specify. It did say it took a US$3.5 billion hit on its own debt; without it, the bank would be doing better than it did in the third quarter last year. But it isn’t.
A gaggle of employees in leveraged finance were told to leave at not come back at HSBC across the pond this afternoon. Severance is apparently 6 months. Asses in the US are so far intact (this morning) but “rumors are obviously flying.”
HSBC supposedly just laid off its entire New York correlation desk. Word is their London counterpart is “probably soon to follow.” If you run into a bunch of sad looking kids tonight saying/spelling out entire phrases that would normally be reduced to acronyms, buy them a drink. They’re probably unemployed.
In related news, Bank of America is paying David Sambol, the Pestilence to Angelo Mozilo’s Plague, $28 million to walk away.
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