Investment banking company Goldman Sachs Group Inc will begin its biggest round of layoffs by letting go of nearly 3,200 employees, news agency Bloomberg reported on Monday. As per the report, more than a third of the job cuts that are likely to start Wednesday shall be in the core trading and banking units.

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Hundreds of employees are also likely to be impacted in Goldman Sachs' loss-making consumer business after it scaled back plans for its direct-to-consumer unit Marcus, sources cited by Reuters said.

Goldman Sachs had 49,100 employees at the end of the July to September quarter, after it added a significant number of staff during the coronavirus pandemic. The report points that under Chief Executive Officer David Solomon, headcount at the company has jumped 34 percent since the end of 2018.

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The job cut development comes at a time when firms around the world, especially in the tech sector, are firing employees as they brace for a tough macro environment. Goldman Sachs bank’s leadership is going deeper than its rivals to shed jobs, the Bloomberg report noted.

This, as institutional banks have suffered a major slowdown in corporate deals as a result of volatile global financial markets. The report added that the scale of firings this year is also affected by the firm’s decision to mostly set aside its annual cut of underperformers during the pandemic.

Analysts cited by Bloomberg estimate that the bank is facing a 46 percent drop in profits, on about $48 billion of revenue. However, that revenue mark has been buoyed by its trading division that will post another jump this year, helping the firmwide figure notch its second-best performance on record, the report added.

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It must be noted that the final job reductions figure is lower than earlier proposals in management ranks that could have eliminated nearly 4,000 jobs. The last major layoff exercise of this scale came after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Goldman had embarked on a plan to cut more than 3,000 jobs, or nearly 10 percent of its workforce at the time, and top executives elected to forgo their bonuses.