“People are not controlling the trends, the trends are controlling them,” is how the financial services market has been summarised by one of our clients.
As the vicissitudes of the economy continue to bite and the post-summer deal flow has yet to take off as hoped, financial institutions have remained cautious over their economic forecasts. This is in spite of the previous implementation of large-scale redundancies in 2001 and 2002 and the relaxation of headcount freezes, which would normally serve as a positive indicator that the worst is over.
