Going Down Under

Australian press reports job cuts at Macquarie Group, one of the country’s biggest banks, may have topped 1000. If so, that’d be about 10 percent of Macquarie employees in Australia, its home base. Erik Jensen in the Sydney Morning Herald says bankers were taken very much by surprise.

They locked the doors down on our level, said we had a meeting. Then they just went around, one by one: ‘Here’s your letter, goodbye,”‘ a senior infrastructure analyst, now redundant, said. “This is no earth tremor, it’s an earthquake. It’s f—ed. It just came out of nowhere.”