What do Deutsche Bank’s mass layoffs mean for the City? Simon Jack of the BBC files a brief guide here and offers a nice analogy which has London as a coral reef, an ecosystem of elements that feed off each other.
Some questions that arise:
What happens to the business the laid off Deutsche bankers would have done? Is it still done by them at a different City bank? Does it flow out of the country? Does it just move to a rival bank, Barclays, say? Or does it disappear altogether? If it just disappears, doesn’t that suggest it wasn’t very useful activity in the first place?
Can we put a figure on what the cost is to the Exchequer of these job cuts? How many of the redundant bankers end up back in the City, how many quit finance to go and be, say, teachers?
There are loads of angles here for hacks and flaks to explore, I think.
The phrase Follow The Money was made famous by All the President’s Men, the movie about the book about Richard Nixon’s impeachment.
It’s sort of become a cliché, but it remains an aspiration for hacks. It’s what we’d do a lot of the time if we weren’t caught up in the day to day stuff. Big banks could do us and the public a service by helping us track what happens next.
