The traditional Wall Street playbook held that layoffs tied to strategic restructuring would boost stock prices, while cuts driven by declining sales would hurt them. That distinction appears to have collapsed.
Goldman's analysts suggest investors simply don't believe what companies are saying ... The real driver, analysts suspect, may be cost reduction to offset rising interest expenses and declining profitability rather than any forward-looking efficiency play.
https://slashdot.org/story/25/12/25/1727221/wall-street-has-stopped-rewarding-strategic-layoffs
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The U.S. Bancorp stock price has gone up solely on account of the general risk in bank stock prices, particularly some of the smaller regional banks, which are setting new ten year highs, the run up in the U.S. Bancorp stock price has nothing to do with the published financial reporting that was released in October or anything that is left to be released in January. But U.S. Bancorp has cut deep into their areas of expertise and eliminated many of the U.S. workers who can make a difference in the financial performance of the bank and its operating business lines and subsidiaries, preferring to reward characteristics not compentency, capability or ongoing results derived in very challenging business environments. The bank's current trajectory isn't going to impress the Wall Street analysts or bring the necessary wow to attract additional institutional investors, such that something will give over the summer, either the Elavon entity will be sold or joint ventured or the bank itself will find itself on the market, with the institutional shareholders driving the conversation, employees will be irrelevant and how the shareholders approach existing, new, longstanding or occassional customers is really anybody's guess.
Imagine being a Street analyst listening to multiple earnings calls and hearing the same intellectually inbred MBA McKinsey types talk about finding efficiencies. The analysts must be rolling their eyes every time they hear that phrase. It's not 1998 anymore. The private sector workforce is stretched beyond capacity and the efficiency trope is played out.