[ by Melanie Gretchen ]

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan won't mince words.  Unfortunately for his employees, he will (still) cut jobs.

The Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank isn't changing course on its March plan to eliminate more than 30,000 jobs amid stagnant revenue.  As promised in March, the 2nd-biggest U.S. lender will produce "demonstrable progress" on job cuts every quarter.  In addition, BofA will reduce spending by $3 billion at the company’s investment bank, trading and wealth-management units.

The Financial Landscape:

• Shares continued unchanged at $9.21 on Wednesday
• Gains this year were 66%, surpassing the 18% advance of the MSCI World Financials Index, suggesting the bank is making some headway
• Losses at Bank of America’s Countrywide Financial Corp., the mortgage unit that was careening toward collapse in 2008, narrowed to $768 million in the second quarter from $14.5 billion in the same quarter of last year.
• Trading and investment-banking revenue at the 5 largest Wall Street firms dropped 18% in the second quarter
• Deal and trading volume fell amid concern that Greece would leave the euro and the region’s sovereign-debt crisis would spread to other nations, including Spain.
• Banks’ profitability is being squeezed by sluggish deal making and new rules on capital, McKinsey & Co. said in an annual review of the industry published this week.

Nevertheless, BofA's CEO was optimistic about his bank's improvement, noting that "everything that we see points that the worst is over, from the amount of delinquent loans, to the amount of seriously delinquent loans to the amount of backlog homes that are still going through the process."

"Like many of our peers, equity issuance is down, so we’re downsizing some of those businesses.  But our corporate banking business and our treasury management business continue to grow and we continue to add people in Asia and around the world." -- Mr. Moynihan, 53, in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Tokyo last week.

For further details, go to [Business Week, 10/11/12].