A Record Year for Layoffs in Finance

Wall Street is hacking jobs in huge numbers due to the subprime mortgage crisis and resulting credit crunch. The purge may not be over yet

by Steve Rosenbush

It's official. This is the worst year ever for layoffs in the U.S. financial-services industry—and there's still more than two months to go.

As of October, finance companies had announced 130,000 job cuts for the year to date, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That's more than double the 50,000 cuts announced in 2006 and well ahead of the record 116,000 announced in 2001. Finance firms are reeling from deep losses in subprime mortgages, as well as from risky corporate bonds and loans. "It's the worst year on record for job cuts in the financial-services sector," says John Pedderson, a Challenger, Gray spokesman. While the firm tracks job cuts, it makes no effort to compare them to job creation, or to track total employment for the sector.

Wall Street Slashes Workforce

About 80% of the job cuts have been announced during the last two months, as the depth of the housing recession has become more apparent, according to Pedderson. The cuts have hit mortgage lenders particularly hard, which isn't a surprise. Countrywide Financial (CFC), the largest U.S. mortgage lender, cut jobs in September. The lender, which employed about 56,000 people before the cuts, eliminated up to 12,000 positions. Mortgage lender IndyMac Bancorp (IMB) said in September it would eliminate about 1,000 workers. Accredited Home Lenders Holding said in August it would cut about 1,600 jobs. That same month Capital One (COF) said it would close its Greenpoint mortgage unit, eliminating about 1,900 jobs.

The job cuts have spread well beyond brokers in the subprime mortgage business, though. Senior mergers-and-acquisitions bankers, financiers, and traders are getting the ax, too. On Wall Street, losses stemming from a liquidity crisis (BusinessWeek.com, 9/17/07) are leading to the first major job cuts since 2003. Morgan Stanley (MS) is slicing 300 jobs and Bear Stearns (BSC) 310. HSBC (HBC) is eliminating 750 positions, Credit Suisse (CS) is cutting 170, and UBS (UBS) is eliminating 1,500. Merrill Lynch (MER) is slashing an undisclosed number of jobs from its subprime mortgage unit.

At Morgan Stanley, the job losses were mostly in the institutional-securities business, which includes investment banking, fixed income, equities, and research, according to one person familiar with the matter. About two-thirds of the cuts are in the U.S., with most of the remainder in Europe and a handful of cuts in Asia. A few people who lose their jobs will be offered new positions in India and China, where Morgan Stanley's business is growing and the right sort of talent is still difficult to find locally. "As part of our yearend process, we are selectively resizing some of our business to reflect current market conditions, as well as reallocating resources to those regions outside the U.S. where we see the best potential for growth," says Mark Lake, a Morgan Stanley spokesman.