NEW YORK / LONDON - A wave of firings has washed away more than 200,000 jobs in the global financial-services industry this year, eclipsing 174,000 in 2009, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

BNP Paribas SA and UniCredit SpA announced cuts last week, and the carnage likely will worsen as Europe's sovereign-debt crisis roils markets.

"This is something very different," said Huw Jenkins, a former head of investment banking at UBS AG who's now a managing partner at Brazil's Banco BTG Pactual SA. "This is a structural change. The industry is shrinking."

Now, faced with higher capital requirements, the failure of exotic financial products and diminished proprietary trading, the industry is undergoing what Steven Eckhaus, chairman of the executive-employment practice at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, called "a paradigm shift".

In interviews, a dozen people who have lost jobs at companies including Societe Generale SA, Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and Jefferies Group Inc described a grim banking landscape that also includes Occupy Wall Street protests against unemployment stuck above 9 percent and income inequality.

"These are by far my darkest days," said Scott Schubert, 49, who was dismissed in late 2008 as a mergers-and-acquisitions banker at Jefferies, and has been unemployed since. "It's harder and harder to look for a job and feel that there's nothing there."

Banks, insurers and asset managers in Western Europe have been hardest hit, announcing about 105,000 dismissals this year, 66 percent more than the region's losses in 2008 at the depths of the financial crisis, Bloomberg data show. The 50,000 job cuts in North America this year are more than twice last year's and fewer than the 175,000 in 2008.

Almost every week since August has brought news of firings by the world's biggest banks. HSBC Holdings PLC, Europe's biggest lender, announced that month it would slash 30,000 jobs by the end of 2013. In September, Bank of America Corp, the second-largest US lender, said it would cut the same number of jobs. Both banks are trimming about 10 percent of their employees.

Last week, 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.

"It's a once-in-a-generation challenge," said John Purcell, founder of Purcell & Co.

London hiring could be frozen next year, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research Ltd. Headcount in the City and Canary Wharf may fall to 288,225 by the end of the year, 27,000 fewer than in 2010 and the lowest since at least 1998, when there were 289,666 jobs, according to the research company.

Wall Street won't regain its lost jobs "until about 2023," Marisa Di Natale, an economist at Moody's Analytics in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said in an e-mail.

Bloomberg News

(China Daily 11/23/2011 page16)