Hundreds more redundancies are expected in the City imminently as JPMorgan disclosed yesterday that it would cut nearly 8,000 Bear Stearns jobs worldwide after the two banks merge next month.

The redundancies are on top of the 4,000 cuts expected to be made among JPMorgan staff and the 1,300 at Lehman Brothers.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, said that he planned to cut about 55 per cent of the staff at Bear Stearns, the Wall Street firm that he agreed to buy in March after a mass desertion by its lenders and customers that had left it on the brink of collapse. The bulk of the Bear Stearns job cuts will be in New York, although London is not expected to escape unscathed.

The Bear Stearns job cuts will come on top of 4,000 redundancies among JPMorgan executives that are related to the merger as well as to the fallout from the American housing crisis.

It also emerged yesterday that Lehman Brothers is in the process of cutting about 1,300 positions worldwide, or about 5 per cent of its workforce, as it seeks to reduce costs. These latest redundancies are in addition to a previous round of job cuts, of about the same size, in March.

Lehman Brothers has its London headquarters in Canary Wharf.

The world’s biggest banks and securities firms have cut about 65,000 jobs worldwide in the past ten months as mortgage losses and writedowns have ballooned to $380 billion (£193 billion), according to Bloomberg data.

Meanwhile, slowing economic growth could cost New York City 59,400 jobs between now and the middle of next year, with the financial sector the “epicentre” of the down-turn, according to a report by the city’s Independent Budget Office. That figure amounts to one quarter of the hiring by private employers after the recession of 2001.

Times Recommends

• Equitable Life halts £7bn sale on market turmoil
• Potential buyers emerge to save Woolworths staff
• Terrorist attacks close Bombay Stock Exchange