Attention Economy


Thursday, May 12, 2016

US Banking Sector – A Reality Check

An interesting piece - Banking’s New Normal BY JAMES SUROWIECKI
“Banks performed dismally last year, and their 2016 first-quarter-earnings reports show that this one is off to an even worse start. Returns on equity have fallen. Bonuses and salaries are being slashed; in the past quarter, Goldman Sachs cut the amount it set aside for compensation by forty per cent. Payroll is down, too: banks have eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in the past couple of years and are now embarking on a new round of severe job cuts. Some of these struggles can be attributed to short-term factors, such as low interest rates and unusually volatile markets. But there’s no avoiding the deeper conclusion: regulations have simply made banking less profitable than it once was. Before the financial crisis, financial companies (not including the Federal Reserve banks) accounted for nearly thirty per cent of U.S. corporate profits. By 2015, that number had fallen to just seventeen per cent.”