He’s got the sound bites down, we give him that much. But could Brian Sullivan, chief executive of search firm CTPartners, be right about a “seismic shift in the population of banking” leading to job cuts that will double to about 350,000 worldwide by mid-2009? That, it seems, is another matter.

The bloodletting in the financial-services industry will accelerate in coming months, with job cuts doubling to about 350,000 worldwide by mid-2009, said Brian Sullivan, chief executive officer of search firm CTPartners.

Reductions on that scale would be equivalent to 20 percent of the global workforce at financial companies before the credit crisis began, said Sullivan, whose firm has worked with Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Banks, brokerages and funds have eliminated about 170,000 positions worldwide.

``This is the financial equivalent of World War II,'' Sullivan said in an interview in Hong Kong. ``It's unprecedented. You're seeing a seismic shift in the population of banking.''

Banks are racing to cut jobs from New York to Sydney as frozen credit markets cause revenues to tumble and the financial industry tries to digest almost $1 trillion of writedowns and losses. The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression will reshape the investment banking industry, as firms lose the ability to use leverage to boost returns, Sullivan said.

``Without the massive leverage that's been in the system, the business of some of these big investment banks simply isn't going to be there,'' he said. ``You'll go back to the investment banks of the 1960s and '70s.''

CTPartners is shifting headhunters from banking to industries such as pharmaceuticals and clean energy as demand for finance professionals dries up, he said. The company is the world's sixth-largest executive search firm, Sullivan said.

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