To stay or to go? More than 50,000 of Merrill Lynch's 66,000 employees are pondering this conundrum with increasing urgency as Friday's deadline looms for accepting the firm's unexpected offer of voluntary redundancy.

This is not the first time that an investment bank has invited staff to resign en masse. Goldman Sachs, for example, implemented a similar and apparently successful voluntary redundancy scheme for its European human resources staff earlier this year. But Merrill Lynch is the first bank to extend the invitation to so many (only US retail broking staff are excluded) and its decision is coming under fire.