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The Los Angeles Unified School District announced staff layoffs. This action comes amidst a significant budget shortfall. The district faces an $877 million deficit. These layoffs are a direct result of the financial challenges. The district is addressing its budget imbalance.
Los Angeles, California
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/video/news/local/lausd-issues-staff-layoffs-amid-877m-budget-shortfall/3861863/
Apollo (APO) & their insurance subsidiary Athene are big private credit players that are under liquidity pressure due to a market perception of increased credit risk resulting in a sharp decline in APO share price. This is important because AT&T off loaded some of their pension liabilities to Athene.
You could be at risk-PAY ATTENTION!!
Under the group annuity contracts, Athene made an irrevocable commitment and became solely responsible for paying the pension benefits of each transferred participant beginning with their August 2023 pension payments. The transaction did not change the amount of pension benefits payable.
The transaction covered approximately 96,000 AT&T participants and beneficiaries, and was funded directly by assets of the pension trust — requiring no cash or asset contributions by AT&T.
This seems interesting as the classed the trademark was filed is 009, 036, 042.
IC 009: Downloadable software in the nature of a mobile application
IC 036: Financial exchange; Financial information; Financial processing
IC 042 Software as a service (SAAS) services featuring softwar for tokenization of assets.
You can go to uspto.gov and search for yourself and get more details.....
Let's see where this takes us.
https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1kk9z3n9c
or
@OP+1kk9z3n9c
From Bloomberg:
Why is this not being discussed? Europe is breaking up with Visa and MasterCard to use their own system. What's going to happen to overseas card acceptance? How does this affect Fiserv and other acquirers?
https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/europes-24-trillion-breakup-with-visa-and-mastercard-has-begun/?amp=1
We need real growth, not by pulling ahead to make quarterly figures. Financial Hocus Pocus always ends in tears.
Despite the online gushing about a Verizon turnaround since CEO Dan Schulman took over, the completion of its break up by delayering, which started more than 10 years ago, seems a far more likely outcome for what was once the top wireless provider in the US.
Verizon has been delayering for a decade
Delayering is when a telco splits itself into separate ServCo, NetCo, and InfraCo layers and sells off its assets to address its debts. (For a deeper understanding, check out this TM Forum research report on it). Verizon has been at this awhile.
Sold its towers
Verizon began delayering in about 2015 when it sold most of its cell towers to American Tower and the rest to Vertical Bridge just last year. Now largely a ServCo-Netco, Verizon leases towers from American Tower, Vertical Bridge, Crown Castle, and SBA Communications. The company still owns its base stations and other network gear, which move toward obsolescence every day.
Sold its data centers
Verizon left the data center business in 2017 through a deal with Equinix and now partners with hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft for data center capacity. So, Verizon does not own much of the physical plant where it runs its IT and network systems.
Verizon’s IT landscape remains on its books, but much or most of that is outsourced and licensed, some is obsolete, and all of it is aging fast. As the pace of change increases across IT markets worldwide, especially with the AI invasion, its legacy BSS and OSS systems become costlier and less relevant to future value.
Spinning off its stores
Most recently, Verizon announced it would convert its company-owned stores to franchised Authorized Retailers. Most likely these physical assets will go to big partners like Victra and Wireless Zone, which already operate thousands of Verizon stores. This also relates to the company’s announced layoffs of thousand of customer-facing employees to shed expense.
Fiber miles next?
Verizon still owns significant installed fiber optic assets. Just as AT&T and T‑Mobile US lease most of their fiber, we should probably expect to see Verizon sell off this physical plant to raise more cash.
Becoming customer-focused? Not really
Schulman’s turnaround spiel insists the company “must shift to a customer-first focus.” This is a tacit admission that Verizon isn’t customer-focused now.
Lip service ripped from T‑Mobile
Spinning out thousands of stores to partners who charge added service fees doesn’t sound like a customer-centric move. The messaging sounds disingenuous and is cut-and-pasted from T‑Mobile’s playbook. T‑Mobile’s “customer obsession” has helped it take the lead in US wireless and it took a few years to kick in.
Cut rate holiday offers
Verizon launched a “bring your bill” holiday campaign to undercut AT&T and T‑Mobile pricing. This isn’t customer-centric, it’s prospect-centric. And it’s a race to the bottom price gimmick Sprint failed with before being acquired by T‑Mobile US.
This desperation rate cut coupled with the 13,000 non-union layoffs looks more like a short-term ploy to bump Verizon’s stock by doing two things Wall Street likes: cutting costs and adding subscribers.
These moves might benefit Schulman’s cadre of executives and remaining shareholding employees. Keep an eye on insider sales the minute the stock price moves north, if it does.
Cannibalizing its own MVNOs
Part of Schulman’s justification for price cutting is to fend off its aggressive competitors and turn the tide on customer churn. Wireless offerings from cable MSOs are major drivers of the churn he wants to stop. Two of the biggest players in cable MVNOs are Comcast and Charter, which use Verizon’s network. Verizon might win some customers away from AT&T and T‑Mobile with its holiday sale, but they will also undercut these wholesale customers.
Back in May, Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath was telling the street that cable MSOs are “a very important strategic partner of ours” adding that because they only focus on certain segments and play in markets where Verizon “may not have a presence… it’s actually a gain for us.”
Here’s your mixed metaphor of the day: Verizon is a snake eating its tail while rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. This is BS on top of BS from Verizon leadership.
A mountain of debt to conquer
One thing Verizon does own is a $147 billion mountain of debt. This stands against less than $8 billion in cash on hand. Some of this debt is a leftover from the company’s debt financed, $130 billion purchase of Vodafone’s stake in Verizon Wireless back in 2014. Selling off assets to American Tower for $5 billion hardly made a dent. Some debt also ties back to its C‑band spectrum auction “win” in 2021, which cost the company more than $45 billion. Spectrum remains Verizon’s prized asset, but it’s not enough to overcome its debts.
This makes Verizon dependent on its rich cash flows. The company reported about $135 billion in operating revenue for 2024, with about $37 billion in cash flow and $19.8 billion in free cash flow. Verizon’s annual interest expense alone is around $7 billion. This doesn’t set a great stage for a turnaround and is a big part of the reason for the company’s mass layoffs just before the US Thanksgiving holiday. Classy move.
There’s not much left for Verizon to sell out of its cupboard and only so many heads it can cut to deal with its ugly debt problem.
If you’re a Verizon IT vendor, get ready to feel the squeeze. You can bet a round of contract cancellations are on the way. It would not be the first-time new management in a US telco booted out as many IT players as it could to cut costs.
Private bankers happy, public shareholders not
What’s left of Verizon will be a low-cost wireless brand that offers less value to consumers than its own MVNOs.
This reduced company isn’t suddenly going to care better for its customers. It won’t cater to businesses better as it trims back the IT and employees it needs to do so. And it doesn’t offer a better network than its rivals.
Schulman may have a great track record making investors happy, but which investors is he trying to make happy now? I don’t think it’s the public market.
Private banking interests will benefit most from the finalization of Verizon’s break up. Public shareholders will be left with the brand, debts, spectrum — if that isn’t also sold off — IT expense, and probably a reduced dividend in the not-too-distant future.
Verizon turn-around? It seems doubtful that’s even the plan. The completion of its de-layering and devouring by private money interests looks like a far more likely outcome. Then it’s a question of who buys whatever is left.
Anyone want to guess?
Just wondering what the goal is of McKinsey and co to destroy employee good will as much as they can.
Every person who takes pride in their work learns to not only stop giving a sh-t, but extract as much as they can from the company out of pure spite. Every department has people deliberately making mistakes and slowing procedures down out of PURE SPITE because they hate this company.
When you first start, you wonder at the incompetence of literally every team around you, but then you are adopted into the culture. The culture is: Smile while doing everything possible to make the company worse and the people around you’s jobs harder. This a joint effort, and eventually you fall in line.
Senior leadership is involved in this joint effort, they pass down initiatives that they know will fail with a smile and a song, and everyone nods enthusiastically, with the same smile, and the grunt employees smile a painful grimace as they purposefully make the process even worse than it would have been initially out of pure spite. But they are still smiling, that’s the important part. Their middle managers get their bonus, the senior leaders get their bonus, everyone smiles and money flows, wasted on infinite vanity projects and processes that don’t work.
Had you asked employees who do these processed day in day out if they might work, they could have told you from the beginning. But these employees likely did express concern at one point, years ago, and learned that that is NOT the Schwab way. The Schwab way is to keep your mouth shut and smile. Everybody knows they don’t work, but that is not important. What is important is that you smile some that whichever C-Suite gets applauded for fudged numbers from their vanity project.
I don’t know how clients think our customer service is wonderful. Everyone I talk to hates their job and is confidently incorrect. It takes me, on average, 10 hours of extra work a week to fix simply mistakes made by other department. I can call five different departments and receive 5 different answers. I don’t blame them, Schwab provides no training (too expensive) and no motivation. Hurting the customer and internal business partners seems to be the only way to lash out at the company that clearly hates you.
So remember you think you are guaranteed but honestly once the pensions were sold off they are no longer federally guaranteed it’s state regulatory guaranteed.Which is dependent on state .So NJ would be up to 250,000 .So if you have more your gambling.I believe.But here is one article https://www.americanretiree.com/post/verizon-retirees-object-to-5-9-billion-pension-spinoff
As project Crane continues to sla-ghter headcount and increase exec compensation the job market becomes even more unfavorable leaving employees unable to pay their WF mortgages, car payments, personal loans and more. Severance pay is only for people with tenure. So many people we new to wells fargo just a couple of years ago which means at best they might see 2 weeks or so of severance. Pay your bills on that, good luck because its not possible. Unemployment in many states is around $200 a week. What can someone really do with that, NOTHING!!!!
Anyone having any insight on this? As we heard big layoffs planned
Finally, SLF seems to have found something she's really good at: sending the stock CONSISTENTLY down at the speed of a failed SpaceX rocket. Time for some put options, because when the FT news is public, and James has to guide the investors, you can make some serious money when the stock sinks below 35! (This is NOT financial advice, though!!!). Say hi to Bob T!
There is 150 million left in the plan for right sizing the company, that's roughly 1500 jobs
Will this happen before end of financial year ?
Stock price collapsing again. Heading to ten bucks a share
There will be no OpenText in 18 months
Something doesn't add up.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/museum-of-fine-arts-boston-slashes-jobs-as-financial-woes-deepen-2741616
There seem to be layoffs spreading across the financial services.... especially asset management and custody space (State Street, Fidelity, BlackRock, Vanguard, Schwab, Citi, Morgan Stanley). I’m curious whether this is mostly cyclical or tied to longer-term structural shifts. What do you think are the main reasons?
Lots of rumblings from both consulting firms and at higher levels in Houston that a significant amount of Shell’s GoA assets in 2028 reach an opex/profitability threshold that will require the ELT to decide whether to divest or commit to cradle to grave with P&A and decommissioning that may far exceed 10 Billion dollars.
Wisdom of crowds and insiders.
What assets get divested?
Can Shell do marginal production management?
Will Shell ride the Idol Iron Clock?
Other interpretations and ideas welcome
Metropolitan Opera Reduces Staff, Programs Amid Budget Woes
The Metropolitan Opera announced layoffs and pay cuts. These measures address fiscal pressures from the COVID-19 pandemic. Twenty-two administrative staff were laid off, and executives face salary reductions. Next season's productions will decrease, and one opera is postponed. The company seeks new revenue and expects full pay restoration by August 2027.
https://theviolinchannel.com/metropolitan-opera-announces-layoffs-amid-financial-strain/
The Hackensack school system's budget deficit has increased to $17 million. This figure is $2 million higher than previously reported. District officials warned that up to 90 staff positions may be eliminated. An audit revealed years of financial mismanagement and improper practices. The Board of Education has sued former officials over their alleged role in the crisis.
https://www.njspotlightnews.org/video/hackensack-school-district-threatens-layoffs-amid-17m-budget-deficit/
Hackensack, New Jersey
Has anyone heard anything, im struggling financially now after years of no rises. Grocery and other costs are astronomical. Its an urgent issue now.
No matter where you work, you should work toward accumulating a financial base to where you can tell anyone that they can go “F’ yourself”. This takes time, a lifetime in some cases but it can be done.
Don’t spend your raises or bonus’s and funnel your extra money into investments. On raises and bonus’s, put about 10% of that aside to reward yourself but be as frugal as you can be. Now Citi does not make this easy as they are extremely lacking in rewards for a job well done but still this is an achievable goal. Work toward a 1 month pay in liquid cash, then 3 months. Put this amount in a CD at a fixed interest rate. Then work toward 6 months, put this into a CD. Then 9 months, same thing, then a full year same thing. Again this takes time. Once done though, as they mature, you’ll be faced with a decision to cash them in or roll them over. Stagger each CD purchase to where they don’t all mature at once. I get it, I really do. This is not a quick fix, its not a fast turn around and you have to spend money to live. It’s a choice though that’s worth the sacrifice. Max out your 401K always.
Resist the urge to have the latest and greatest Iphone, entertainment center, PC, car….etc. … Work hard toward wealth, not money. Build enough wealth to where you don’t care what Citi does. Enough cash reserves to where if you get let go, its of no significance to your life.
If this is so great and fail safe why am I still working at Citi, you may be thinking. I have a good gig. I’m happy and I get paid. Should Citi ever deem my employment no longer needed, that’s ok too. Should Citi ever do or mandate something that I don’t care for, no issue there, I’ll just walk. Simple as that.
I admit, its not always been that way but like I said, this takes a tremendous amount of time and its exponentially harder to do if you have kids but this is what Citi hinges on. They rely on your desperation, your continued need to have to have this job. The more desperate you are, the more you can be abused and strong armed to work crazy hours with the implied “or else” that’s aways preached. They are masters at telling you several things to enforce this. Key phrases such as “its a bad job market out there” , “better the devil you know”, “other banks operate just like this” and on and on. At times all of this is true, at times only some of it and at times none of it is true.
There are other job sectors to look into you know. Citi would have you believe that this is the only place you can ever work and this is the only place that would ever employ you. It’ll do you no good to ever look anywhere else for a job, this is as good as its ever going to get in your life. This is just not true so don’t buy into it.
Work hard, invest what you can, invest in yourself as well (skillset), be patient, network outside of Citi, take care of your heath and work toward the goal of having enough money to where you walk away anytime you want to.
First quarter of 2026
Out of curiosity I did some AI based research to see how and when a company must account for severence expenses under GAAP, taking into consideration 60 day notice periods, and basically they can incur the expense when they notify you so long as their is little chance of a reversal. additionally. if they have already made their lists for the first part of 2026 (q1/2) and are certain those positions are going away they can take the expense earlier such as in the $612MM hit we took this past quarter. So while severance expenses are expected to be lower by $700MM in 2026, part of the reason they can say that is that layoffs happening in the next few months are already paid for.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/blackrock-cut-around-250-jobs-latest-layoffs-2026-01-13/
Does anyone know if the bonus payout is similar to last years?
More layoffs this year
It’s coming
https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/cvs-unitedhealth-cigna-accused-of-diverting-billions-via-shell-firms-93CH-4433238
Follow the money.
This begs the question of how budgets were managed in such a way to not only reduce bonuses and promotions but eventually cause mass layoffs.
richard baker steps down and now they need $1 billion to keep the doors open. get your resume ready!
Other than a lot of buzzwords, what the he-l does it actually mean?
Keep hearing tunors of AML/ Finananciao crimes cuts in 26
They say inflation is going down since 2023 but I still see everything breaking the bank including basics like groceries to homes. Stock market is predicting a recession next year by end of year. Taking careful financial steps and planning next year is the key to survive.
If there is a global financial reset like they are talking about, employed or not, we’re all in trouble. Half the economist don’t want to talk about it out of fear that it’d cause a panic sell of stocks, which in turn expedites it. The other half have been singing it from the rafters as a warning. IF it does happen, your dollar is worthless. Your paycheck regardless of amount will all be equal, the same value, nada. What concerns me is that economist all over the globe are worried about the same thing and are leaning more toward a “when” instead of an “if” it will happen. Thoughts?
It’s the most recent layoff in an ongoing pattern. The bank has filed 19 WARN notices for 461 eliminated positions, and 40 more workers have been told they will be laid off in January 2026.
https://who13.com/news/metro-news/63-wells-fargo-employees-to-lose-jobs-on-december-26-more-to-come/
Nordstrom Credit Bank is located in Colorado but has remote employees in Arizona who will be laid off as part of the transition.
The Colorado location was not closing but would retain only a few employees after the transition, Laura Duve, of Nordstrom’s human resources team, wrote in a letter to the Arizona Department of Economic Security.