Since the beginning of the subprime crisis last July, financial companies around the world have fired a total of 83,000 workers, sparking fears that the global recession could be worse than expected. This from Bloomberg:

It’s as if the entire workforce at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley vanished in less than a year.

From Tokyo to London to New York, financial companies announced plans to shed more than 83,000 jobs since last July as revenue and compensation pools evaporated, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg. The dismissals range from 90 jobs, or 0.1 percent of the total, at London-based HBOS Plc to about 9,160 jobs, or 66 percent of the workforce, at New York-based Bear Stearns Cos., which is being acquired by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Bankers only have themselves to blame for their predicament, says William Patalon III in Money Morning.

“The banking system’s ‘originate-to-distribute’ model changed the rules of the game. No longer did banks make loans that were based on very careful risk-of-loss analyses. Under the new system, banks make loans – such as subprime mortgages – which are then ’securitized’, or packaged together, into debt instruments that the trading operations of banks, investment banks or institutional investors might then purchase, believing it was a way of achieving higher returns.

“Initially, this led to higher profits. Which induced banks to boost lending so that they could boost securitizations. But here’s the problem. First, since the banks were no longer going to keep the loans, they relaxed lending standards. In fact, they actually had to since, second, they wanted to boost those volumes. When the underlying loans unraveled as the subprime-mortgage crisis spiraled deeper and deeper out of control, companies such as The Bear Stearns Cos. Inc. (BSC) took losses that just kept growing. Bear Stearns is now being taken over by JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), with the help of the U.S. Federal Reserve.”

The wider jobs picture in the US isn’t much better, and Andrew Gordon in Investor’s Daily Edge sees as lot more pain ahead for the US economy.

“The truth is, employment isn’t holding up well,” says Andrew. “And prices aren’t being held down too well.”

“What seasonality giveth, it will taketh away… come June. These very important inflation and job numbers will not merely slip. They could very well drop drastically. Wall Street won’t like that. If crude prices remain well above $100 by then (as I think they will), it will be damning evidence that the Fed couldn’t, after all, finesse its way out of the twin threats of no growth and rising inflation.

“This is my contrarian take. While most economists and brokerages have been predicting a 2nd-half comeback for the economy, I believe it’s going to begin a major leg down. Depression/recession, crisis, runaway inflation, a new bear market, and Fed impotence will be Wall Street’s new battle cries. It won’t be pretty.”