The cost-cutting on Wall Street is playing out in painful slow motion, as month after month another bank eliminates thousands of jobs, long after markets and businesses were first walloped by the credit crisis.

For their workforces, it's death by a thousand tiny cuts.

In the latest wielding of the ax, Citigroup will eliminate some 6,500 jobs, or 10 percent, from its global investment-banking business, report David Enrich and Dennis Berman of the Wall Street Journal. Citi has already announced this year that it will eliminate more than 13,000 jobs.

Even Wall Street's golden child, Goldman Sachs, is downsizing. Chris Hughes and Saskia Scholtes of the Financial Times report that Goldman has already begun cutting investment-banking staff and plans to reduce the merger advisory and underwriting workforce by 10 percent.

Everyone else on the Street is getting smaller as well. Lehman Brothers is aggressively cutting jobs, and thousands of Bear Stearns employees lost their positions in the takeover by J.P. Morgan Chase.

Bloomberg News estimates that the world's biggest banks and investment houses have eliminated more than 80,000 jobs since the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market.

"I see more downsizing to come," Andy Mantel, managing director of Pacific Sun Investment Management Ltd. in Hong Kong, told Bloomberg News. "Banks need to take precautionary measures."

Wall Street—and the New York region—will feel the brunt of the cuts. Although Wall Street accounts for just 5 percent of the jobs in New York, it provides nearly a quarter of all wages in the city.

But the way that Wall Street is cutting jobs—over months and often with large severance packages—means that the impact is being felt only gradually, Patrick McGeehan of the New York Times noted last week.

"It's like the tsunami is still making its way across the ocean," Marcia J. Van Wagner, New York's deputy comptroller for budget, told the Times.

She estimates that the Street has cut 20,000 to 40,000 jobs in recent months.