The latest industry to suffer labour shortages: investment banking

AFTER A DISMALMA decade, bankers of all stripes had reasons to be cheerful last year. Eighteen months of soaring corporate dealmaking generated for mergers and acquisitions (&) desks. Their counterparts in debt advisory played midwife to a deluge of newly minted bonds. Bouts of high volatility buoyed traders’ revenues. Though the dealmaking frenzy may have cooled a little in 2022, lenders are licking their lips at the prospect of sharply rising interest rates.Yet the industry faces a talent squeeze. Bank bosses used the last earnings season of 2021 to gripe about the problem. Deutsche Bank’s Christian Sewing was “very concerned” about a war for talent; Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon said it caused “wage inflation everywhere”. The subject seemed likely to raise its head again as Wall Street banks reported their first-quarter earnings after we went to press.