More Subprime Fallout: 1,400 More Jobs Cut

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The hits -- in the Sopranos sense of the word -- keep coming in the subprime mortgage industry. Reuters reports that General Electric’s WMC Mortgage unit plans to lay off 771 people, or more than half its staff. WMC, based in Burbank, will close facilities in Costa Mesa and San Ramon.

Bloomberg reports that GMAC will also lay off 600 to 700 people in its mortgage lending unit, Minneapolis-based Residential Capital, known as ResCap.

‘The subprime mortgage market is going to shrink by 75 percent in terms of jobs and volumes of origination,’’ said Ken Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. ‘These companies got too big. They were giving people loans they shouldn’t have and now they’re getting rid of all that.’’

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