After Massive Job Cuts, Wall Street's a Different Place

On the June day that Michael Reiner lost his job as a credit strategist for Société Générale in New York, he turned in his cell phone, visited a nearby store to replace it, and called his wife. She was at their home in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., watching The Company Men, a film about corporate downsizing. He was shocked, he says, by the way his job “simply came to an end.”

The 44-year-old former managing director was caught up in a wave of firings that will wash away more than 220,000 jobs in the global financial-services industry this year, eclipsing 174,000 dismissals in 2009, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Almost every week since August has brought news of firings. HSBC Holdings, Europe’s biggest lender, announced that month it would slash 30,000 jobs by the end of 2013. In September, Bank of America, the second-largest U.S. lender, said it too would cut 30,000. Both banks are trimming about 10 percent of their workforces. In November, BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, said it will cut about 1,400 jobs at its corporate and investment-banking unit, and UniCredit, Italy’s biggest, said it plans to eliminate 6,150 positions by 2015. “This is a structural change,” says Huw Jenkins, a London-based managing partner at Brazil’s Banco BTG Pactual. “The industry is shrinking.”