DealZone

Ever wonder how General Motors is holding onto its top talent? 

After a traumatic bankruptcy and series of federal bailouts, the company still owes billions of dollars to the U.S. and Canadian governments. It lost $1.2 billion in its latest quarter, and only sees a slight uptick in auto sales next year.    

The days of banner-year profits and bonuses must seem far off for GM’s executives and finance staff.  GM’s Chairman has already said pay caps imposed on companies by the U.S. government’s pay czar make it tough to hire executives.

While other job opportunities are obviously limited in Detroit, and they may have nowhere better to go in the industry,  the company’s plans for a 2010 IPO has emerged as a key staff retention tool, one of its top executives said on Tuesday.

In comments to the Financial Executives International Current Financial Reporting Issues conference in New York, Nick Cyprus, vice president, controller and chief accounting officer at GM said:

“I have a tool that my peers don’t have. We have an IPO coming up in the next half-a-year to a year or whatever it takes. That’s a great tool, too. Getting the experience of taking General Motors public again is not only a great tool from an experience perspective and resume builder, but it’s also a great experience in that if things work out well there are potential wealth opportunities. In essence, the taxpayers get paid back and people who have delivered get an opportunity to make some money.”

That will ultimately be the question asked about what kind of a future the German carmaker Opel faces.

Parent General Motors said on Thursday that it indeed wanted
to sell a majority stake in the unit to Canadian auto parts
group Magna and Russia’s Sberbank, a decision long favoured by the German government under Chancellor Angela Merkel.

With about two weeks to go until a general election in
Europe’s biggest economy, this would clearly be a political
victory — but the question remains whether it will also be an
economic one.

Is now the time to be bulking up in M&A and other kinds of corporate finance advice?

On Monday, Societe Generale trumpeted the hire of a top French dealmaker from JPMorgan — the auspiciously named Thierry d’Argent — and reiterated its big plans for European M&A. Daiwa Securities SMBC agreed to buy mid-market corporate finance house Close Brothers Corporate Finance. Meanwhile Barclays Capital is making lots of equity markets hires, and says it aims to be one of the world’s top full-service investment banks.

As I wrote:

“A clutch of banks with previously limited reach in European takeovers and other corporate advisory work are betting now is a good time to grab market share — before the dealmaking business recovers.

The bear market’s message to MBA graduates – tough luck.

MBAs who graduate during a bear market may never get the chance to start a Wall Street career, which means they would earn significantly less over their lifetime than those who graduated when things were rosy around them, a Stanford business school study shows.

The proportion of graduating MBAs who manage to get hired into lucrative investment banking positions shrinks or expands depending on how well the stock market is performing in a given year, according to the study by Paul Oyer, an associate professor of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The study is based on the long-term career choices and salaries of the school’s graduates over 35 years.

More than a quarter of Stanford MBAs who graduated two years before the stock market crash of 1987 became investment bankers, but only 17 percent graduates two years after the crash took that career path. And investment bankers were estimated to make a lot more over their lifetimes than those who went on a different path.

It’s the end of April, which means that a bunch of first-year MBA candidates are freaking out about not having summer internships lined up yet. But we’re here to help, with our annual Desperate Interns Drive.

This is a lot like the Internship Rodeo from November, except that it’s later in the game for both employers and employees. So if your firm or one of your portfolio companies is looking to hire summer interns from the current crop of first-year MBA candidates, please drop me a note at daniel.primack@thomsonreuters.com.

All postings will be put into peHUB’s password-protected MBA Forum section, and can include as much or little information as you’d like to provide. Minimums are firm type (VC, LBO, I-Bank, etc.) and job location. If you’d like to keep your firm identity anonymous, just be sure to let me know.

    JPMorgan is cutting 30 percent of its research department, according to two former employees, but the bank is keeping mum about its plans and declined to give details of the cuts.
    David DeRose and Leighton Thomas, co-founders of a Bear Stearns alternative research unit that moved to JPMorgan when that bank acquired Bear a year ago, said on Wednesday they sold the unit to an investment firm largely because they could not hire more staff under JPMorgan’s management.
    “If you stay under a research division that’s being cut 30 percent, we can’t get any headcount,” said DeRose.
    JPMorgan intends to shed 1,000 to 2,000 jobs from its investment bank this year, co-investment bank chief Steve Black said at the bank’s investor day in February.
    It was unclear whether the cuts DeRose mentioned are included in these figures and a JPMorgan spokesman declined comment.
    Research staff may be an easy target for cuts, since it is hard to quantify their contribution to the bank’s bottom line.
    And banks’ research divisions across Wall Street have been shrinking since the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2002 banned firms from using banking fees to pay analysts.

By Elinor Comlay

Financial public relations firms, who elevated the honing of corporate messages to a highly profitable art form, are having to adapt their businesses and in some cases cut staff as the economic gloom intensifies.

With far fewer deals to publicize and lucrative “retainer” contracts under pressure, companies are cutting costs and are increasingly focusing on work thrown up by the crisis, such as capital-raising, restructuring and repairing tarnished images.”

So what exactly are they up to?

Some recent pr industry blogs and other web postings shine a light on some of the spinmeisters’ latest tactics.