Wall Street still expects bonuses: survey

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The government may have doled out billions of dollars to banks and a revolt over Wall Street excesses may be mounting, but a new survey finds that many U.S. financial professionals still expect to get fat bonuses at year end.

Despite a ferocious bear market and thousands of layoffs in their beleaguered industry, some Wall Street pros expect an even bigger payout than last year's, according to the survey.

The survey, by eFinancialCareers, a unit of specialty jobs site operator Dice Holdings Inc (DHX.N), found 67 percent of Wall Street workers who responded expect a bonus this year.

That might be news on Capitol Hill, where many politicians have called for bankers to sharply scale back or eliminate bonuses in light of the massive $700 billion bailout package passed a few weeks ago.

Some companies have already signaled they are scaling back, with Deutsche Bank AG (DBKGn.DE) saying earlier this month its top executives would forgo bonuses for 2008.

But more than a third of the respondents expect a single-digit percentage increase, outnumbering those who predict their bonuses will shrink, according to the survey obtained exclusively by Reuters.

Meanwhile, one in 10 said they expect this year's bonus will be at least 33 percent higher than last year's.

The online survey was conducted this month, after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the passage of a massive government bailout package. It included about 1,400 responses.

Wall Street has among the most performance-related compensation cultures in the world, with bonuses typically accounting for the bulk of a person's pay.

In a good year, a bonus can be four times base salary. In bad times, companies risk alienating employees by cutting or eliminating such payouts, said John Benson, founder and CEO of eFinancialCareers, a global financial services jobs site.

"They take a risk, even in this tough recruitment market, that those people will be attractive to other employers," Benson said.

For example, he said, in the aftermath of the Lehman bankruptcy, recruiters stepped up advertising to draw the attention of Lehman employees.

While Wall Street overall has generated large losses, that does not mean every part of a financial services business has been unprofitable. Anyone who generated revenue this year can expect to be rewarded, Benson said.

"Wall Street is not going to change its cost structure and start paying much higher base salaries," he said. "That makes their employee cost structure more inflexible."

(Reporting by Nick Zieminski; Editing by Brian Moss)