Yet those suffering the most are the foreign firms that were trying to break into Wall Street’s business. Nomura Holdings has pretty much scuttled its most recent Wall Street experiment (it bought Lehman Brothers Holding Inc.’s European and Asian banking operations) and firms such as Societe Generale Credit Suisse Group and Royal Bank of Scotland Group are all cutting Wall Street bodies.

In November, Bloomberg News estimated that more than 200, 000 people who work in finance had already lost or would lose their jobs this year.

The vast sums overpaid to bankers and traders will inevitably continue to fall as well — as many of them are finding out this bonus week. The decline in Wall Street’s compensation will mean less tax revenue for New York City and New York State and fewer government services for the rest of us (absent higher taxes).

The most reliable leading indicator of Wall Street’s future prospects is the way recent graduates of Harvard, Princeton and Yale — supposedly our best and brightest — choose to spend their time after graduating. For years, hordes of graduates from those schools beat a fast path to Wall Street. Now the road is far more difficult to travel. There is the prospect of incurring the wrath and scorn of fellow students who make up the various Occupy Wall Street movements — a fact not likely to deter many — and then there are dimmer prospects for a job on Wall Street generally, what with the slowdown in business.