German Deutsche Bank sacking 18,000 in $8.3 billion 'reinvention'

FRANKFURT/ SYDNEY/ HONG KONG: Deutsche Bank laid off staff from Sydney to London on Monday as it began 18,000 job cuts in a 7.4 billion euro ($8.3 billion) "reinvention" which Germany's largest lender said would mean yet another annual loss, knocking its shares. In a retreat from a decades-long ambition to make its struggling investment bank, which employs 38,000 people, a force on Wall Street, Deutsche Bank said it would scrap its global equities operations and cut some in fixed income.

Shares in Deutsche Bank, which has almost 91,500 staff around the world, erased early gains and were down after the bank's finance chief flagged "significant uncertainty" whether it would break even in 2020. Chief Executive Christian Sewing told journalists from the bank's London office, where hundreds of the cuts are expected, that he was "doing nothing short of reinventing" Deutsche Bank, which will have been in the red for four out of the past five years as it dealt with a series of setbacks.

At Deutsche Bank's investment banking headquarters in London, where the bank employs 8,000 people, several said they were leaving for the last time, though few were keen to talk. "I was terminated this morning. There was a

very quick meeting and

that was it," said one IT worker, who had been working on a project in the bank for more than two years.