New York City and state continue to lose Wall Street jobs in disproportionate numbers compared to the rest of the country.

In the first quarter, the nation’s securities industry lost 3.4 percent of its jobs, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, citing Department of Labor data, tells us. In New York state, the job loss was 6 percent. In New York City, the job loss was 5.1 percent.

The data show that New York’s trend of gaining a larger share of the nation’s securities jobs starting in the mid-2000s, after the city had lost a huge share from the Seventies until the Nineties, has once again reversed itself.

In 1973, New York City had 40.9 percent of the nation’s securities jobs. by 2000, that figure had been cut in half, to 20.7 percent.

But as the Wall Street of the 2000s required much more highly educated (although not necessarily so commonsensical!) people to work in close proximity to each other, rather than armies of back-office workers too expensive to warehouse in New York, New York started to gain again.

The year 2000 was the low; by 2007, New York City was back up to 22 percent of the nation’s securities jobs.

Now, it’s back down to 20.8 percent — close to that 2000 trough.

And there’s no sign that our job losses are almost over. In fact, as of March, the trend of job losses was still accelerating; in March, New York City had lost 9 percent of its jobs compared to March 2008, a increase from the 8 percent loss rate seen in February, 7.6 percent in January, 5.7 percent in December (and 3 percent in September, the month Lehman collapsed).

New York has now lost 11.8 percent of its securities industry jobs since this particular job cycle’s peak, in August 2007.

Between 2000 and 2003, for comparison, the industry lost 18.7 percent of its jobs. But it never did regain that 2000 peak.

And back then, at this point (time-wise) in the cycle, the worst of the job losses were pretty much over. This time, they’re still gaining speed.

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