Year Brokerages: Securities and Bank Accounts

year brokerages: The securities firms will add a total of about 1,540 people in their annual intake next April, down from 1,847 this year, according to The Japan Times. Brokerages are cutting back on their retail businesses, which had accounted for more than half their total profits in the years when stocks surged after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came to power in late 2012. The total number of planned graduate hires in 2018 by Nomura Holdings Inc., Daiwa Securities Group Inc. and SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. will be the lowest in five years, according to a Bloomberg News survey of hiring plans. This initial optimism has faded, and increasing political risks are prompting individual investors to park their cash in bank accounts rather than invest in securities even in a negative rate environment. It became difficult for Japanese households to foresee the global economy after huge market swings on big surprises such as Brexit and Donald Trump's election victory. The stone-cold mindset on risk products still exists, and expectations for Abenomics are going backward, said Takashi Ueno, senior economist at NLI Research Institute. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.