Earnings season kicks off this week, with JPMorgan, BofA and Citigroup finally expected to divulge what happened in the three months from April. Given that this includes the difficult month of May, it’s not likely to be pretty, although results may be massaged by debt valuation adjustments.

If Q2 results aren’t matched by an improvement in the second half, redundancies may well return from October. Lina Saigol highlights this in an article on zombies in today’s Financial Times

‘Supply may have outstripped demand. Trading commissions have dried up, volumes of initial public offerings have been lower than expected and the predicted recovery in global M&A activity has failed to emerge,’ she observes.

If the gloomy predictions turn out to be true, there may be better places to be than UBS, BofA Merrill, Nomura, or Morgan Stanley.

What these banks have in common is a big programme of fixed income, currencies and commodities hiring in the first half. Morgan Stanley is arguably less vulnerable, having made most of its 350 hires across sales and trading in the second half of 2009.

However others, particularly UBS and Nomura, are said to have paid some generous guarantees to hire across fixed income, currencies and commodities in the first half. UBS has also hiked senior level salaries to the top of the market range.

Unless revenues come through, there may therefore be a need to trim heads to maintain the bonus pool. “People are UBS are worried,” says one fixed income headhunter. “They’ve hired so many people this year that unless the performance of the bank is stellar, the bonus pool is going to be very limited.”

Fortunately, not everyone agree with this prognosis. “It’s been a challenging quarter,” says Mark Lane, US banking analyst at William Blair & Company. “Volatility was unmanageable and revenue was down pretty broadly across most businesses in fixed income, but it’s too early to say what the impact [on banks like Morgan Stanley] will be for the year.”