This may have been the worst year for the banking sector since 2008.
First Republic Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank all collapsed, and while they were merely regional American banks, they were still prominent enough to warrant an emergency response by the Federal Reserve. Outside the United States, the Swiss government had to broker the acquisition of Credit Suisse by UBS in response to the former’s collapse.
Even with these government interventions, however, twenty of the world’s largest banks collectively cut nearly 62,000 jobs in 2023, according to the Financial Times. This was done to keep up profits in the face of elevated interest rates and much higher caution by banks following the mini-crisis. Although that number is not as bad as the 140,000 job losses during the Global Financial Crisis, that’s hardly comforting.
Being “not as bad” as the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression doesn’t mean much. It’s like saying what’s going down in Israel and Ukraine isn’t so bad because World War II was worse. Especially when you consider that the number of job losses may be substantially higher than that because the Financial Time’s figure doesn’t include job cuts from smaller, regional banks.
