With 190,000 finance jobs gone, isn’t it time for banker bashing to stop?

It’s not going to be a popular rallying cry, I admit. Somehow ‘Save the Bankers’ doesn’t quite pull at the heartstrings in the same way as ‘Save the Whales’ or ‘Save the Pandas’. Yet the news comes to us today that UK banks will have slashed nearly 190,000 jobs worldwide by the end of next year from their peak staffing levels. That’s equal to the whole population of Geneva.

The figure applies only to the Big Four banks of RBS, HSBC, Lloyds and Barclays, so the number for all City-based banks is probably larger. Nor is what is happening with the Square Mile’s financial institutions only a reflection of the world at large — Wall Street is actually hiring again as the American economy recovers, while Asia’s finance industry never suffered that much in the first place, and is probably poaching talent from US and Europe. (Standard Chartered, which makes most of its profits in Asia, is targeting 2,000 hires this year.)