For employees at the biggest Wall Street banks, 2012 brought a humbling post-crisis reality of job cuts and lower pay, but the 81-company Standard & Poor’s 500 Financial Index is up 27 percent this year, its largest annual increase since 2003, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Nine banks -- Deutsche Bank AG, Barclays Plc, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America, Citigroup Inc., UBS AG, Credit Suisse Group AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley -- announced more than 30,000 job cuts in the first nine months of the year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Total pay for traders and investment bankers is about half what it was in 2007, according to an October report from Options Group, a New York-based recruitment firm.
