More and more Wall Streeters are swapping pinstripes for pink slips as the city’s financial sector sheds jobs.
There’ll be 33,000 fewer Big Apple bankers and financiers by the middle of 2009, the city’s Independent Budget Office estimates.
These losses come on top of an estimated 83,000 financial-company layoffs worldwide since last July, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg News.
New York City is taking the brunt of the layoffs, with an estimated 10,000 financial-service job losses since August, a dip of 3.5 percent, federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data show.
Bear Stearns alone is firing 9,159 people, or 66 percent of the company’s total, and Manhattan-based Citigroup is in the process of laying off 15,900 of its workers worldwide, a 4 percent reduction.
“More job cuts will come. Even with the market’s optimism recently, I don’t think we can safely say we are out of the woods yet,” said John Challenger, chief executive officer of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.
Banks and securities firms add jobs in hot emerging markets like Shanghai and Dubai, but the traditional financial centers of New York City, London and Tokyo are struggling.
The Wall Street suits in the trenches are worried sick about the cuts.
“They are dropping like flies,” said Andrew Murino, a broker with Mercer Capital. “All the floor brokers are scared to death.”
The 9/11 attacks wreaked greater havoc than the current problems precipitated by the subprime-mortgage crisis, but that’s little consolation.
The 33,000 current local job losses represent about 7 percent of all of the city’s finance jobs.
Between 2000 to 2003 New York City lost 52,000 jobs, or 17 percent of the sector’s total.
“In the last recession, there were a lot of back-office jobs cut or moved overseas that never came back,” said Marisa Di Natale, an economist at the research firm Moody’s Economy.com.
She predicts that the New York metropolitan area will lose 45,000 financial jobs, or 7.7 percent, compared to a loss of 60,000 jobs after 9/11.
By comparison, London is expected to lose 19,225 finance jobs through 2009, a loss of 5.4 percent, according to the Center for Economics and Business Research. With Bloomberg News
cbennett@nypost.com