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Wall Street’s Gucci-loafers set has something to smile about.
Bankers, despite a tough year for their companies, enjoyed a nearly 10 percent bump in their bonuses this year, according to an annual estimate of securities sector profits by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
Facing an onslaught of massive job cuts at firms like Barclays Capital, UBS, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase — that saw tens of thousands of their co-workers handed pink slips — bankers still holding a job saw their cash bonuses rise 9.3 percent, to $121,890, in 2012.
Cash bonus payouts are still down 31 percent from their peak in 2007, when bankers took home an average of $177,830, according to DiNapoli.
Despite being down from their peak, the total bonus pool on Wall Street increased to $20 billion in 2012, up 8 percent from the prior year, the comptroller’s data showed.
The financial sector historically has represented the state’s biggest driver of revenue.
Indeed, the securities industry accounted for 23 percent of all private-sector wages paid in New York City, even though it accounted for only 5 percent of the city’s private-sector jobs, DiNapoli said.
Wall Street is undergoing one of its most dramatic retoolings in a generation on the back of the 2008 housing collapse.
That meltdown led to job cuts and a wave of tough regulations, including those that ban proprietary trading and force big banks to hold more capital on their balance sheets for a rainy day.
DiNapoli estimates that New York’s securities industry lost 28,300 jobs during the financial crisis — and has regained just 8,500 positions during the years-long recovery.
Last year, employment was mostly flat, with many of the biggest US banks stepping up jobs cuts in the last six months.
“These [Wall Street] jobs are well-compensated positions that are five times the private sector average — but we have fewer people taking advantage of them,” DiNapoli told The Post.
It may be another two or three years before the financial sector recovers, he said.
“I think it’s an industry still in transition. It’s going to be a couple of years before we know what the new normal is,” he added.