Guest debate: MDs most at risk of redundancy?

Having seen layoffs at several times, and from multiple perspectives, I think that Bard is both very close to the money, but with a twist. He is apparently assuming a rational, business driven approach to reducing costs. I suppose that could happen, but is not what I've seen.
For a start, some firms will cut costs by saying to managers "you must lose X% of your staff", not "X% of your costs". Also it is the MDs who usually get tasked with this costcutting, making it all a bit complex.

There's no reason to cut vice presidents and analysts at this point - analysts are relatively inexpensive, the global economy has continued to boom and we don't have a recession yet. In specific businesses, like sub-prime loans and CDOs, we will have redundancies, but this is not a 2002 situation, where all areas of the brokerage industry have collapsed.

Where there are cuts, senior staff will bear the brunt of them - there's no loyalty to managing directors on The Street. A downturn offers an opportunity to a) thin the ranks and offer promotion to up and coming vice presidents and b) take the pressure off the compensation pool.

Senior people head up businesses and if banks want to get out of those businesses they tend to get rid of those first. You'd hope they will then consider redeploying junior people, but they aren't always particularly good at that.

Banks also tend to be slightly lemming-like - once one moves out, all the others will tend to follow.

The advice for junior people when redundancies are being made is therefore to make sure you can network your way across the organisation - there will be opportunities, you need to make sure you can go and find them.

I can't confirm your default scenarios of big lay-offs to come: I work for a German IB at VP level and have seen not only my collegues been stretched way beyond their resources for at least 2 years but also friends and former collegues at other IBs confirm a similar picture: banks seem to have been rather reluctant to add personell on VP/AS levels in non-emerging market locations.

People will get canned irrespective of level, if they are underperforming. But banks will probably err on clearing out mid-level people. The problem with more senior people is that they are more expensive to sack - you have to pay them money to go.