Firings 'not as bad as in dot-com bust'

Job cuts in the financial services sector are not as bad as those in 2001, Bloomberg reports.

The news agency compiled figures from the 28 firms which have dismissed workers, based in the financial centres of London, Tokyo and New York, and found that cuts extended to 3.3 per cent of the overall workforce.

This is significantly down on the previous economic slump following the dot-com boom seven years ago - which saw 17 per cent of jobs in New York banking and securities firms lost.

The proportion of job losses ranged from 0.1 per cent of the total workforce at UK lender HBOS to 66 per cent at Bear Stearns - the US investment back which nearly collapsed in March due to credit crunch-related market volatility.

Commenting, Marisa Di Natale at Moody's Economy.com said: "In the run-up to the dot-com bust, there was a very frenzied pace of hiring on Wall Street, and we didn't have that this time around…and in the last recession, there were a lot of back-office jobs cut or moved overseas that never came back.''