Dear all,There have been alot of talk in the press about UBS/BOA/(Merrills) giving large (50%) salary increases to bank staff from VP/MDs depending on their salary grades.For Quants which tend have much less upside than traders/sales people this could be fairly significant. Is anyone working at a place where they know of Quant salaries going up by large amounts? What about on the headhunting side? I would have thought so far there is still a huge excess of people?Trying to figure out what will happen for myself and I am sure many other people are wondering how it will impact them.Links below to related newsUBS http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... 7.htmlKind Regards

My data is of course skewed since P&D have few sales, compliance, etc people on our database, but the sense I get is that the raises do not seem to be very targeted, and are mostly driven by rank not function.What about on the headhunting side? I am told it is bloody in the other recruiting firms, a number seem to have left this line of work entirely, one is training to be a physics teacher.I would have thought so far there is still a huge excess of people?Depends on how you are looking at it.Speaking specifically about quant jobs, the number of new hires has come down about as hard as you might think it has.But banks seem to be letting the quants go last, on average.So it's better thought of as a horribly illiquid market, where both buying and selling is more effort, and of course the approval process for headcount is actually designed to make it harder.Last week I was explaining to a journalist at Risk/Waters that we seem to have a huge overhang of people who want to move, but have decided that the market is not attractive at the moment.That is not just the TARP / Nationalised banks where morale is less bad than you might think (which is not quite the same as good).Also it is not homogenous...The market for algotraders with a track record is showing a useful uptick (we would particularly like to talk to any such people that we have not yet contacted).The fixed pay thing is of course good for pimps like me because a useful chunk of our business model is driven from base / guarantees, we usually don't get much if anything from year >= 2 bonuses.But objectively I don't think higher fixed pay is good for the industry, it is not flexible in bad times, has undesirable characteristics for risk, and cannot easily be structured to incentivise people well.There is also a filtering phenomenon...People who believe that they will succeed in a given time frame will prefer bonus driven pay.People who don't believe they will deliver will prefer fixed pay.Apply that filter and you can see that this can do bad things to the skill structure in your firm.Trying to figure out what will happen for myself and I am sure many other people are wondering how it will impact them.There is not a

increases here included all our quants as well on a similar scale as trading in terms of % increase