Merrill CEO Thain expects 'thousands' of job cuts

Merrill Lynch & Co Chief Executive Officer John Thain said he expected “thousands” of job losses from the bank’s $50 billion takeover by Bank of America Corp.

Most of the cuts will fall in information technology, operations and finance, Thain said in a television interview in Dubai today. Jobs won’t be eliminated in the fixed income and commodities divisions, he said.

“We haven’t mapped it out in terms of actual number of people, but we are committed to saving $7 billion across the combined platforms, and that will be a challenge,” Thain said. “Between our two companies it will be clearly thousands of jobs.”

Thain turned to Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis last month after a crisis of confidence in Wall Street firms forced Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc into bankruptcy and raised speculation Merrill could be vulnerable. The firm has already cut more than 5,000 jobs in the past 18 months, taking its headcount to about 60,000, in an effort to rein in costs as credit markets froze.

Thain said he expected those markets to thaw over the next six to twelve months after governments in Europe and the US injected trillions of dollars into banks last week to avert a financial crisis. The US government will inject $125 billion into banks, including $25 billion into Bank of America, which is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and New York-based Merrill.

Interbank lending rates, which had surged as banks hoarded cash after the US sub-prime market collapsed, have fallen from records. The London interbank offered rate (Libor), which banks charge each other for three-month loans in dollars, last week posted its first weekly drop since July.

“That is the beginning of unfreezing of liquidity between banks,” Thain said. “You will start to see some access into the commercial paper market in the US so that the capital injection, plus the other pieces of the programme that the Fed and Treasury and FDIC put together, will start to unfreeze the commercial paper market.”

The government plan won’t avert a recession, Thain added. “Over the next 12 months we are still going to be in a global recession,” he said. “I don’t think the economies of the world will recover quickly. Clearly the US economy is contracting significantly. The question for me is how deep and how long the recession will be.”

Thain, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc executive, earned the nickname “Mr Fixit” for his stewardship of the New York Stock Exchange for four years beginning in January 2004. He replaced Stan O’Neal as Merrill Lynch’s CEO last December, after the company’s losses from securities linked to sub-prime mortgages began to emerge.