Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer
John I think it probably is sort of about a broad level and Bruce can touch in. So if you think about in the fourth quarter a couple of things happened. One is, you have to remember margins for the investment was down so be careful not to forget as we see it coming back this quarter and expect it to rise as it just did in the first quarter. That would be a increased expense which you should want obviously. And the rest of it, it is basically a continuous process of taking out expenses and bringing the bottom-line of reinvest growth so to give you a straightforward way in the fourth quarter the reduction headcount of approximately 5,000 and 1,100 or so was LAS and the rest was core activity we will just be growing down expense base at the same time we have added salespeople during that quarter. So what we’re trying to do is — ideally we wouldn’t expect it to fall dramatically but I’d expect you guys to be able to see us continuing to make strong investments in sales capacity, technology, products, while holding expenses relatively flat with a slight down or biased, irrespective of you just got to be careful of the compensation related to revenue because we don’t want that to be higher.
John McDonald, Sanford Bernstein
Okay. Okay, thank you.
Operator
And our next question will come from Brennan Hawken with UBS. Please go ahead.
Brennan Hawken, UBS
Yeah hi, good morning.
Bruce Thompson, Chief Financial Officer
Good morning.
Brennan Hawken, UBS
So in FICC, it seems a little bit below what certainly what I was looking for and I know you highlighted some of the difficult markets that you’re large in. Was there any specific positional pain given what we saw in some of the credit spreads and some of the movements there?
Bruce Thompson, Chief Financial Officer
No, not at all. Go back to the core premise that we talk about which is that the banking and markets businesses are run as an integrated business and a lot of the activity that we see within the markets area is in market making and other things that are done off of the new issue platform from an underwriting perspective and I think what we saw during the quarter, particularly in December was that there was a significant slowdown as we saw overall volatility in the markets from both a new issue as well as a secondary market perspective that flow through but there were not any — if you look here, there were no losses or particular pain points within the global markets piece of the equation during the quarter.
Brennan Hawken, UBS
Okay, thanks. That helps. And then can you guys add any comment to the press reports we have seen about you’re rationalizing the PB business and cutting ties to 150 H1 class?
Bruce Thompson, Chief Financial Officer
Well, I think this is a customer profitability exercise. As we look at driving the franchise, the way Tom and [indiscernible] have done a good job repositioning the equities business. We had the constraints of prime brokerage a bit due to size because of the flow of balance sheet return, as you’d be aware of, but importantly it’s the customer profitability. We are looking for customers who will use this with multiple products and services, what is fixed income, equities and all that there is a fixed income and so as we take this scarce resource which is the GAAP balance sheet and the RWA balance sheet and allocate it across customers. We’ve got to make sure we get the returns and this was the math to reflect on.
