Bank of America said Wednesday that it was "well on its way" towards raising the nearly $34 billion in capital that government regulators said it must do earlier this month to have a buffer for future loan losses.
The beleaguered banking giant said it has raised almost $26 billion since the government announced the results of its so-called "stress-test" program, including $13.5 billion through a stock sale.
Bank of America Has Raised $26 billion [CNN Money]
...needs a few more years to get through its "cost-cutting initiative." Head count dropped by 3,000 from last quarter, the bank said today. Bank of America this quarter entered the second phase of "Project New BAC," its companywide cost-cutting initiative, targeting a $5 billion reduction in spending by the bank by the end of 2014. Some of that will come from job cuts, the bank has said, as it plans to reduce the number of positions at the bank by 30,000 over the next three years...The current phase of New BAC will be focused on saving money in its commercial banking, global wealth and investment management, world-wide corporate banking, global markets and some support functions. The spokesman could not confirm that future reductions will be limited only in these businesses, as "some of the ideas that came from Phase 1 will take a number of years to implement." [FINS]
If it did, the BAC would be treating its li'l bankers as though they were individuals with unique talents rather than lumping them together and calling them all by the same name. Anyway, here are a few more details about Brian Moynihan et al's plan (announced yesterday) to fire a bunch of senior people and bus teams of junior employees around wherever they're needed to pick up the slack. From the front lines: "Worord is BofA will merge junior banker resources into several broad "superpods" across the bank. Appears to affect analysts, associates, and some VPs. Also some rumors that the juniors making up the superpods might be co-located. Essentially they just became that much more interchangeable and replaceable and commodified. Politics and turf battles here between groups are pretty bad as it is...this is only going to make it 5000x worse."