The Money Ax

wall-street-layoffs-begin-wsj: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance: "The trading slump on Wall Street has battered profits and is about to cost some people their jobs.

Credit Suisse Group AG (NYSE: CS - News) started laying off investment-banking employees Tuesday, and the cost-cutting push could claim 400 to 600 jobs, according to people familiar with the situation.

This month, Barclays PLC (NYSE: BCS - News) has eliminated 100 jobs in its investment bank, including some stock-trading employees. The latest cuts are on top of 600 layoffs in January, a person familiar with the situation said.

And at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS - News), the annual survival-of-the-fittest culling of 5% of the securities firm's employees won't be enough in 2011, according to someone familiar with the New York company's plans.

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Deeper cutbacks will be made throughout Goldman, this person said, especially in the U.S. Goldman still plans to add more employees in Singapore, Brazil and India.

"Banks are chopping a lot of wood, both deadwood and live wood," said Michael Karp, managing partner at executive-search and consulting firm Options Group.

The cutbacks are coming largely because of sluggish revenue growth on Wall Street's trading desks.

Regulators have clamped down on trading strategies that once generated huge profits but then backfired with staggering losses during the financial crisis.

Meanwhile, bread-and-butter trading clients from hedge-fund managers to mom-and-pop investors are doing less buying and selling, depriving firms of commissions and fees.

"There's definitely apprehension," said Roger Freeman, an analyst with Barclays Capital. On a recent visit with Goldman, Mr. Freeman discussed with executives how some hedge funds with small trading gains preferred to lock in those gains from earlier this year rather than risk losing them on new trades.‬‪

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Howard Marks, chairman of Oaktree Capital Management LP, which manages more than $80 billion in assets for pension funds and other investors, told clients in a letter last month that "other people's increasingly aggressive behavior tells me to seek cover."

Lots of other investors are heading for the sidelines. Average daily trading on U.S. stock exchanges slipped in the second quarter to its lowest level since 2007's fourth quarter, according to Barclays Capital."