About some time back, Steve Ferdman celebrated getting a job offer from Credit Suisse in the usual Wall Street fashion.
Over expensive oysters and dark rum cocktails at a trendy Manhattan restaurant with his parents, he toasted landing the full-time position after working six months as a consultant without benefits.
A week later, Ferdman, 28, sat alone at the same place and ordered a gin and tonic to lament getting laid off by the bank, for the second time since 2008. When he told the bartender about his misfortune, his next round was on the house.
?I did everything right. I came into work every day, I put in long hours, and I still got punched in the face,? Ferdman said. ?People shouldn?t want to work in this industry anymore.?
Being young on Wall Street once meant having it all: style, smarts and too much money to spend wisely. Now, twenty-somethings in the finance industry are losing both cash and cachet.
Three years after the global financial crisis nearly brought Wall Street firms to the brink, the nation?s largest banks are again struggling.
As profits wane, layoffs have claimed thousands of jobs and those still employed have watched their compensation shrink. These problems are set against the morale-crushing backdrop of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has made a villain of a once-lionised industry.
Much of the burden of Wall Street?s latest retrenchment has fallen on young financiers.
The number of investment bank and brokerage firm employees between the ages 20 and 34 fell by 25% from the third quarter of 2008 to the same period of 2011, a loss of 110,000 jobs from layoffs, attrition and voluntary departures.
By comparison, industry headcount dropped by 17% in the same period, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data for New York City provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of staff members over the age of 55 decreased by only 11%.
Young financiers have experienced setbacks in the past. Bankers and traders who rushed wide-eyed to Street in the halcyon days of the 1980s were waylaid by the stock market crash of October 19, 1987, known as Black Monday. Then they got pummeled in 2000 by the dot-com collapse and the recession.
But experts say today?s doldrums, unlike previous downturns, are here to stay.
?A lot of the positions that are being cut right now aren?t coming back,? said Leslie K Hild, a vice-president with the recruiting firm Right Management. ?It?s an emotional roller coaster for almost everyone.?
The industry?s woes have also hit plans of undergraduate and graduate students at the nation?s top colleges.
At Harvard Business School, where a relatively high 39% of this year?s graduates went into finance, compared to 34% last year, there has been a ?heck of a lot more anxiety? about next year?s hiring season, says William A Sahlman, a professor of business administration.
?People used to think of some of these organisations, like a Morgan Stanley or a Goldman Sachs, as safe career bets,? professor Sahlman said.
?Those firms are not
going away, but they?re going to hire half the people they hired before,? he said.