Financial News has an interesting article today on where the senior M&A hiring action has been this year. As (our) graph below shows, the answer is clearly that it’s been at Nomura and Barclays Capital, with Citigroup, Credit Suisse and Deutsche playing a contributory role.

JPMorgan, UBS and BofA Merrill Lynch haven’t hired any senior M&A bankers at all so far in 2009.

Source: Financial News

The circulation of 104 senior M&A bankers has happened regardless of the relatively moribund M&A market: global deal value was down 50% year on year in the first half.

Headhunters say biggish hirers in European M&A like Macquarie also deserve a mention. There’s no sign, however, of the predicted M&A recruitment efforts at SocGen, and Mizuho.

With little chance of a big uptick in M&A until 2010, junior hiring remains nearly non-existent and existing teams are being worked to the bone on pitches. Rumour has it that Goldman has slashed its investment banking headcount by 50% since the highs of 2006, and BofA Merrill Lynch, which promoted Tom Montag to run investment banking earlier this month, is said to have made additional M&A redundancies in the past few weeks.

“Teams are a lot smaller and juniors are getting killed on the hours,” says one M&A recruiter.