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Welcome to The New World Order. Jobs Are Dying. Careers Are Collapsing
It’s worse than you think.
The UK banking industry has been replacing thousands of “low-value human capital” this year. That’s the term the CEO of standard chartered bank used. I’m not even kidding. Former Singapore president Halimah Yacob called the language “disturbing and demeaning.” We thought ai was eating jobs. No, it’s not. It’s doing more than that. It’s a total work invasion. And it’s spreading. Tech futurists have been saying this for some time now. Maybe the decision to get rid of people was made by ai. “The danger of the future is that men may become robots,” social psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm once said. Now the numbers, if you don’t mind. Standard chartered is cutting 7,800 roles by 2030. About 15% of its corporate workforce. Back offices in India, Malaysia, Poland, and China. Barclays is cutting 5,000 jobs this year. One thousand are already gone. Four thousand more by the end of 2026. That’s 5% of its global workforce. Most of the cuts are happening in operational and functional roles.
HSBC is going even further. It’s axing up to 70% of its UK financial advisers and roughly half of its management and specialist roles in wealth management. Ouch. Someone at the bank said it’s “deep, wide and brutal.” Two years ago, the same bank launched a hiring drive to…
