Pink slips are the order of the day at many Wall Street firms, as head counts and balance sheets shrink. The most spectacular number of proposed job cuts at a single firm is the 53,000 that Citigroup announced on Nov. 17.

Those proposed layoffs come on top of the 22,000 jobs the banking group announced earlier this year that it would shed, a total reduction of 20 per cent in its workforce since the end of last year.

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Firing financial firms
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But not all financial firms are shrinking their payrolls. Mergers, forced and otherwise, are adding to the employee ranks at a number of financial firms. To see which financial firms had most grown or shrunk their staff this year, we looked at the employee numbers listed in firms' latest quarterly SEC filings and compared them with their filings at the end of the last fiscal year. That generally gave us a comparison of employee numbers at the end of September and at the end of 2007.

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Using data from Reuters Fundamentals via FactSet Research Systems, we screened a universe of 101 financial firms, from nationally known banks, to regional banks, savings banks, investment firms and real estate investment trusts.

They ranged in size from Triangle Capital, an asset manager that employs 13 people (up two from the end of last year and up six from the end of 2006) to Citigroup, which before its latest round of announced cuts, had 352,000 employees around the world, down from its 374,000 at the end of last year but still above the 327,000 it had at the end of 2006.

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Since the end of September, some banks have announced layoffs that won't be reflected until their next quarterly report is filed. As well as the 53,000 at Citigroup, there are 7,000 job losses coming at American Express and 2,000 apiece at Morgan Stanley.

Banks growing in size include JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, which expanded their head count by 31 per cent to 228,452 and 21.4 per cent to 247,024, respectively, between the end of last year and September, mostly as a result of acquisitions.

But as the industry absorbs weaker firms through consolidations, the overall number of jobs will likely shrink. Moody's Economy.com recently raised its projection of job losses in financial services by two-thirds, to 100,000 from 60,000.