NEW YORK — Fallout from the financial crisis is walloping the people on Wall Street who created it -- and many who didn't.
Citigroup Inc. revealed plans Monday to remove more than 50,000 jobs from the financial giant's payroll in a bid to drastically reduce expenses and rebound from billions of dollars in losses brought about by the housing-market collapse and weakening economy.
The disclosure came a day after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said its top executives would forgo annual bonuses, intensifying the pressure on other Wall Street chieftains to follow suit.
The announcements demonstrate the extent to which the financial pandemic is pummeling Wall Street itself, expunging thousands of jobs and leaving drastically shrunken paychecks in its wake.
"It's getting ugly fast," said Doug Turetsky, chief of staff of the New York City Independent Budget Office.
In a "town hall" presentation to employees, New York-based Citigroup said it planned to pare its worldwide workforce to no more than 300,000 people by the middle of next year from roughly 352,000 at the end of the third quarter.
About half the cuts will come through layoffs, with the rest accomplished through sales of individual business units, according to a Citigroup spokeswoman.
A layoff of 25,000 people would tie for the 11th largest on record, according to employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., which has been tracking layoff announcements since 1993.
This is Citigroup's second sizable cutback in the wake of the mortgage meltdown. The firm previously said it was lopping off about 22,000 positions.
All together, Citigroup is seeking to reduce expenses by 20% from their peak this year.
"There is nothing easy about these decisions and the impact on our people," Vikram Pandit, Citigroup's chief executive, told employees. "We do this because we must, and not because we want to."
Wall Street is being joined in cutting back by a growing number of companies across the broad economy as the housing downturn and credit crunch take their toll.
Of the 1.2 million U.S. job cuts this year, half came in the last three months, including 240,000 jobs in October.
Like many big financial institutions, Citigroup has been hobbled by brutal losses that began with the blowup in the subprime-mortgage market.
