Morgan Stanley
will slash 1,000 jobs, scale back its U.S. residential mortgage
operations and shut down British home lending unit Advantage Home Loans
as new management takes a hard look at the continued deterioration in
mortgage markets.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Morgan Stanley
will slash 1,000 jobs, scale back its U.S. residential mortgage
operations and shut down British home lending unit Advantage Home Loans
as new management takes a hard look at the continued deterioration in
mortgage markets.
The cuts will effect employees that engaged in wholesale and
correspondent mortgages, generating loans through brokers and other
third parties. The company said the moves also mean undisclosed
reductions in people who packaged these loans into bonds that could
then be sold and traded.
Morgan Stanley is closing its British mortgage origination business,
but will continue servicing through its Morgan Stanley Mortgage
Servicing Ltd unit.
A year after investment banks first revealed that a housing slump
was leading to subprime mortgage losses, the market for mortgage-backed
securities remains effectively frozen. As a result Wall Street firms,
which built up home lending businesses that could feed their
securitization activities, have no place to sell these assets.
Rather than get stuck holding these loans, banks like Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers have been cutting back on loan production.
Spokesman Mark Lake said many of the people being cut will be
informed today. The company expects costs related to these moves will
be immaterial and declined to elaborate where cuts were made.
The cuts come about two months after co-President Zoe Cruz was
forced out for her role overseeing a debt capital markets business that
suffered billions of losses from an ill-conceived bet on mortgages. The
firm shook up management of the investment banking and trading
business, leaving Michael "Mitch" Petrick in charge of all securities
trading.
Morgan said it will continue to service mortgages — which means
sending bills and collecting payments for loans — in the United States
through Saxon Mortgage Services.
The bank also will still sell residential mortgages to its brokerage clients through Morgan Stanley Credit Corp.
Morgan Stanley joins well over 100 mortgage lenders that have
slashed jobs or gone out of business in the last year as the U.S.
housing crisis deepened and credit conditions worsened.
The move also represents an about-face for Morgan Stanley, which
expanded its mortgage business after John Mack took over as chief
executive in June 2005. At the time, mortgage underwriting and trading
was a profit engine for Wall Street, and banks scrambled to close the
gap against leaders like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.
Morgan acquired Advantage Home Loans in December of 2005 and then
bought Saxon Capital Inc, a residential lender and servicer, for $706
million in December 2006.
Lake, the Morgan spokesman, would not disclose how many people
worked in Morgan's mortgage businesses. Mortgage Stanley Credit Corp
will employ about 100 people after the cuts.
Company-wide, Morgan Stanley had 48,256 employees.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel and Joe Giannone; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
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