“Last month, veteran J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. investment banker William de Jonge helped orchestrate the $2.9 billion sale of Galileo International Inc. to rival Cendant Corp.,” writes Susanne Craig in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“Now he will soon be out of a job, the victim of Wall Street’s accelerating efforts to slash staff amid the current market slump. His departure notice last week shocked some colleagues, because he was a managing director, a senior post, with more than a decade of experience at J.P. Morgan. Neither Mr. de Jonge nor a spokesman would comment.”

“For much of this year, Wall Street firms have ground out piecemeal layoffs of lower-level staffers, many of them in technology-related positions. Now, with the financial markets continuing to deteriorate, the cuts are kicking into high gear — and more-seasoned investment bankers and other producers are getting hit.”

“Consider some recent cutbacks. Citigroup Inc., the nation’s largest financial-services company, last week said it plans to eliminate 3,500 jobs, bringing the total to be cut so far this year to 4,700, or nearly 2% of its work force. J.P. Morgan Chase plans to let go 8,000 employees — 8% of its work force and 3,000 more than first anticipated. Charles Schwab Corp., which already cut 3,900 employees, or 15% of its staff, this year, said last week that ‘further restructuring initiatives,’ including additional cuts, are likely during the next few months. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. expects job cuts to total about 1,000 this year, though hiring will practically offset these cuts.”

” ‘It is going to get much deeper than initially anticipated,’ says Joan Zimmerman, a Wall Street recruiter at G.Z. Stephens Inc. Earlier this year, industry executives predicted they could keep job cuts to about 10%. Now, Ms. Zimmerman and others predict Wall Street employment levels will fall by about 15% this year.”

“Why the gloom? Stock underwriting and merger-and-acquisition activity remains moribund. So far this quarter — since July 1 — for instance, there have been just 194 stock-underwriting deals completed, reaping $26.9 billion in underwriting fees, compared with 350 deals during the same period last year, for $51.3 billion in fees, according to Thomson Financial. M&A activity isn’t faring much better: The dollar volume of completed deals has sunk 39% from a year earlier.”

“The result: Wall Street pink slips are cutting deeper into the firms. At first limited primarily to nonproducing divisions such as human resources, cutbacks increasingly are spreading into areas such as M&A and investment banking. For instance, this week, a handful of managing directors were let go in J.P. Morgan’s investment-banking department, positions which had, for the most part, been spared in this year’s cuts. J.P. Morgan has let go of about 15% to 20% of its M&A banking team, people familiar with the matter say.”

“The brokerage business certainly has room to slash more jobs. The Securities Industry Association, a trade group, estimates industrywide profit for this year could total about $15 billion, down 28.5% from last year’s profit of $21 billion.”

“Indeed, the pace of profits has fallen below 1999 heights. So some analysts say securities-industry employment in the U.S. will have to be ratcheted down to those levels, when Wall Street firms employed about 716,000. This still is 7.3%, or 56,000 employees, below the industry’s May 2001 employment level of 772,000, according to the SIA.”