Against the backdrop of historic turmoil on Wall Street, we sent out our fourth annual Bankers’ Survey to clients to get their views on where their business is now and where it’s heading. The take-away: It’s all heading down. Truly, every question – from assessments of overall pipelines to forecasts for specific lines of the banking business to headcount projections to the prediction of number of IPOs next year – prompted a dour outlook.
We’ll have a full report on the 15-question survey in tonight’s 451 Group daily email, but in the meantime we wanted to share two of the highlights (of the bearish variety) from the 127 responses to the survey. Perhaps the most revealing finding is that when bankers looked at the value of current deals in their pipeline, more than half of them said it had shrunk since the same time last year.
The dried-up pipelines have tech bankers seeing their ranks thinning even more in the coming months. (Note: Our survey was taken before Citigroup announced plans to cut some 52,000 jobs, the single largest corporate reduction in years.) Some 35% of respondents to our survey expect additional headcount reductions at their own firms, four times the percentage that predicted layoffs last year. Again, look for a full report on the survey later tonight.