Britain’s Barclays reined in its ambitions to be a Wall Street powerhouse on Thursday and signalled a return to its retail roots with a plan to hive off much of its investment bank and axe one in four jobs at the division. Chief Executive Antony Jenkins, in his second strategic review in as many years, will cut 19,000 jobs in the next three years, 7,000 of them at the investment bank, and park 400 billion pounds of assets in a new "bad bank". A slide in trading revenue due to investor uncertainty and tough post-crisis regulation combined with a string of senior staff departures and a row with shareholders over bonuses have forced Jenkins to take a knife to the investment bank, built up under predecessor Bob Diamond and once the firm’s profit engine.

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