汇报一下现在华尔街的就业形势

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Grim Reaper of Jobs Stalks the Street
Layoffs as High as 20% Are Predicted
As the Banking Downturn Widens;
Self-Reinforcing Cycle of Risk-Taking
March 11, 2008; Page C1

The banker résumés are streaming into Wall Street recruiting company Options Group. On average, 100 are arriving each day. Three of them will lead to jobs.
Dennis Berman discusses upcoming layoffs on Wall Street, including which jobs are most prone to downsizing.

While Wall Street's chief executive officers talk calmly about "normal attrition," the people in the trenches know the score. Big, painful firings are coming their way. Lehman Brothers Holdings cut 5% of its employees yesterday. That's just the start. Many privately say industry layoffs will be worse than in the 2001-2002 down cycle. Others are already invoking the bloodlettings of the early 1990s.

The irony is that the process reinforces the cycles the Street is trying to prevent. An investment banker fearful of being fired in a downturn will furiously harvest cash when times are good. That creates dangerous incentives along the way, as bankers focus on short-term profits, neglecting long-term risks.

Meantime, the industry is going to eat itself. Top Wall Street executives foresee layoffs of as high as 20% for Wall Street, which employs about 210,000 in New York state alone. If layoffs are that severe, job rolls would plunge to mid-'90s levels. "I've never seen so many résumés come to me at any time in my life," adds Options CEO Michael Karp.

A look at the numbers explains the restlessness. U.S. investment-banking fees are off 48% from the year-earlier period, according to Dealogic. Banks' lending revenues have fallen a stunning 84%, mergers work is off by half, and debt and equity levels are each off by 21%. Some bankers in the lending business are reporting to work two days a week. "If they say they're busy, they're lying," said one head of investment banking.

Yet the numbers don't describe the full picture. Easy credit via bank loans, high-yield bonds and asset-backed securities nourished the investment-banking ecosystem. A $10 billion private-equity deal might beget $40 million of advisory revenue, plus $70 million in bank lending fees, and $50 million in fees for loans against real estate. That might create an IPO two years down the line, generating $60 million more.

Poof. That's gone.

For seven months, Wall Street has been in denial about the task ahead. The expectation was that the markets would clear by the spring or summer. And even if they didn't, it would be foolish to slash a work force before the inevitable recovery. "Selective reductions" is how Merrill Lynch Chief Executive John Thain put the layoff question on a Jan. 17 conference call. "This is not a case where we're targeting thousands and thousands and thousands of people."
[Game]

But the longer the wait, the worse the news gets. Blackstone Group said yesterday that the credit mess wouldn't ease until next year. Back during the dotcom bust of 2000 to 2003, New York state securities employment dropped by some 18%. Banks weren't begging sheiks for capital back then. Today, they're so strapped they're making margin calls on their best clients. And that gives them less flexibility to hold on to employees, even when they should.

"You've got to cut and stay ahead of it," said one person with knowledge of the situation at Bear Stearns Cos. Another person close to Lehman, which has fared better than its peers, says layoffs there could hit around 10%. Just yesterday, the firm said it was cutting 5% of its employees.

Who is most likely to get the ax? A group of investment-banking heads described their strategies, which generally consisted of saving the "coverage platforms" and jettisoning some of the banks' technical experts. That's Streetspeak for keeping the bankers with the best personal relationships, while booting the wonkier types who actually execute the transactions.

There are a host of other tricks: Furloughing associates for a year; cutting bonuses and daring bankers to find jobs in a down market; "elevating" senior bankers at lower pay levels and higher titles.

But those can hold back the tide for only so long. Wall Street "tends to overhire and overfire," says Gary Goldstein, chief executive of Whitney Group, a Street recruiting concern. "My guess is that they'll do the same thing this go-around."

Here on Wall Street, even the fixes are broken.