Barclays sounded a retreat from global investment banking as it slashed 7,000 jobs from what was once the heart of its business and moved more than half of the unit’s assets into a “bad bank”.
The withdrawal from large parts of its fixed income, commodities and trading operations leaves Deutsche Bank as the last European investment bank with ambitions of competing toe-to-toe with the “bulge bracket” groups on Wall Street.
Following in the footsteps of rivals UBS, Credit Suisse, and Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays said it was cutting more than a quarter of staff in its investment bank and moving £400bn of assets – many of them from its trading book – into a non-core unit.