OMW, it’s interesting working in financial services at the moment.  LOL!  Never a dull moment.

I’ve been through a bad market before, but the last time I was a bit “green” about it all.  And this one is BIG!  Huge!  I’m sure you guys have all read about it, or at least know that there’s a problem… it’s in every newspaper and every news bulletin you hear and see.

It’s just so interesting to work through these times…. hopefully that doesn’t change!

Everyone you speak to in the market, not just in my company, but other local and international companies is just wondering when it’s going to affect them, and how they’ll get affected.

There’s talk and news articles about retrenchments in companies already.  That hasn’t taken long.  Posts have been frozen in a lot of companies for a few months now, but all of a sudden there’s a flurry of retrenchment talk.  And before you say “but I thought it was only in the US”… well, that’s not the case.  A lot of local companies are owned internationally, so it goes without saying that if there’s a problem overseas it’ll affect us.

Retrenchments might not happen, but already huge cost cutting exercises are being practised in most companies.  And I’m sure it’s not going to be long before a lot of IT projects are scaled back or changed completely as focus has shifted from growing and trying to be clever, to trying to maintain the client base and keeping afloat – if that hasn’t happened yet!

I bumped into one our top portfolio managers last week on the escalators, and he just said “It’s rough out there”.  I think that’s the understatement of the decade.  The traders are already looking haggard.