The finance industry is beginning to feel the effects of an expected economic downturn and firms are slimming down in anticipation.

Goldman Sachs was hit with a wave of layoffs this week that affected more than 3,000 of the firm’s staff, or about 6.5% of its total workforce. Those were the first layoffs for Goldman since before the pandemic. Also this week, the world’s largest money manager BlackRock, culled about 500 of its workers from its payroll.“We’re already starting to see layoffs at Wall Street firms and there is talk about some restructuring in the banking industry,” Thomas Smythe, a finance professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, told the Washington Examiner.