Out in the Street

Maybe Wall Street should think about occupying Main Street.

After years of outpacing growth in the broader economy, the financial industry — dogged by tougher regulations at home and Europe’s spiraling debt crisis abroad — is lagging the rest of America.

The financial sector’s share of New York City’s work force, which accounts for 5.2 percent of the Big Apple’s 3.2 million private-sector jobs, is at its lowest point since the early 1990s, according to figures from the New York State Department of Labor.

Analysts estimate that as many as 200,000 lucrative paying financial jobs have been lost over the past two years.

Wall Street’s shrinking head count comes even as the nation’s overall labor market shows signs of improvement, with the unemployment rate dropping to 8.6 percent this month from 9 percent in November — its lowest level since March 2009.

While Wall Street firms saw an uptick in employment after the 2008 credit crisis wiped out firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, the rebound turned out to be short-lived.

Bank of America, Barclays Capital, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, among others, have aggressively slashed jobs as Wall Street’s profit engine sputters.

And Wall Street firms may just be getting warmed up.

New York’s Independent Budget Office is forecasting a loss of 5,200 financial sector jobs between the second half of 2011 and the first half of next year.

The continued decline in financial services stands in stark contrast to the IBO’s prediction for overall growth of 38,800 jobs next year, a few thousand more than in 2011.

The budget office attributes its dour forecast to “a combination of weak economic growth, new regulatory constraints and declining Wall Street profits,” according to its most recent report on New York’s fiscal outlook.

Bank sources told The Post that some firms such as Credit Suisse are waiting to see how rivals wield the ax before they make any decisions on new rounds of layoffs.

“Everyone wants to wait and see what other firms are going to do because they want to see how deeply they can cut without being viewed as too brutal,” said one New York-based bulge bracket banker.

Fewer Wall Street “fat cats” may turn out to be a fact of life for the budget-challenged Big Apple, which relies heavily on tax revenues derived from high-paying financial jobs.

The IBO is projecting $13.2 billion in profits from Wall Street in 2012, down from the office’s already lowered estimate of $15.4 billion for this year.

“Still weighed down by the baggage of the crash and faced with shaky financial markets worldwide, Wall Street has played a much smaller role in the city’s current recovery than usual,” said James Brown, principal economist at the NYS Labor Department.