What hope is there when even these small houses are laying everyone off?
It's not been a good morning: it's emerged that now Citigroup is planning 900 redundancies in its investment bank, SocGen is planning "hundreds" of cuts in its corporate and investment bank, and everyone is anticipating a lot of shrinkage when UBS announces its strategic plan tomorrow.
In the current climate, this isn't unexpected and - proportionately - the latest cuts are lighter than previous announcements at other investment banks.
However, with the vast majority of big players cutting back, many people will have been holding out hope that smaller operations will now take the opportunity to pick up some bulge bracket bankers. Such hopes, however, look increasingly unrealistic.
Yesterday, mid-market investment bank Altium said it was closing its securities business in London (at the cost of 30 jobs), while Alphaville suggests that Religare is also considering its options in the UK.
This follows deep cuts at Evolution this week, which was down to its takeover by Investec in September, as well as small brokers like FinnCap, Matrix Capital and KBW.
So, what hope is there? Firstly, as we pointed out yesterday, there could still be opportunities at Japanese, Australian and Canadian banks.
Then there's the fact that Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein has gone against the grain to opine that the current cost-cutting is necessary, but not "radical, structural change".
Finally, there's...Liberum Capital, which - according to City AM - is said to in talks about "borrowing a balance sheet" to enable it to have the firepower to compete with the bigger players on underwriting and fund-raising.
At the end of last year, Liberum increased its headcount to 140 (from 108 in 2009) and 89 of those employees were in the front office. It paid an average of 167.6k.
It's been hiring steadily throughout 2011, and even announced the appointment of Alison Watson, as lead analyst for its UK real estate team and Ryan de Franck to its corporate finance division as recently as the end of October.
