Back in one of the items tucked into the Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") post entitled March 27, 2008 TCM Observations, TCM noted that already 20,000 financial services sector jobs had been eliminated since the start of 2008. Lars Toomre wondered what the reader's over/under number might be for the total number of Wall Street jobs that might be shed in 2008 when all of the stealth layoffs are factored in. He personally was thinking that the total reduction might be close to 100,000 this year.

On Sunday, May 25^th 2008, The New York Times focused on the psychic toll the current round of layoffs is having on the many people affected in an article written by Sarah Kershaw entitled Wall Street Exodus: Fear, Panic and Anger. The article starts "The mind wraps itself around losing a job, one of life's great traumas, in jagged and swerving fits. When the call comes in, when rumor turns to reality, when it's not the broker in the next cubicle but you who is presented with a stack of severance papers, the psyche takes over. It goes numb. It goes into survival mode. Fear quickly turns into anger. For some, there may be relief in saying goodbye to what therapists call the "psychological terror" that has haunted the corridors of troubled financial institutions since last summer. But what follows — the unknown — may be no less frightening."

Apparently by the NYT's count, "Since August, banks worldwide have announced plans to eliminate as many as 65,000 jobs. Many losing their jobs now have lived through other crises on Wall Street — the 1987 market crash, the widespread layoffs of the early 1990s and the financial upheaval of 1998. But investment bankers, recruiters and psychologists say the current economic downturn, the cascade of layoffs and the steady beat of grim financial news have exacted an especially daunting psychic price."