London’s fixed income headhunters have nothing to do.

“If I were to rank activity on a scale of 1-10, I’d say we’re at 1 right now,” says the head of one FICC search boutique. “It started at 10 in March, went to 6 during the summer, and now there’s nothing. If we’re lucky, we might get 1 or 2 hires in before the end of the year, but I doubt it.”

There’s never much recruitment at this time of year, but from a fixed income perspective autumn 2010 is looking peculiarly bleak.

“So much hiring was done on guarantees in the first and second quarters that people are worried now about the bonus pool,” says the head of global markets at an international search firm. “Even base salary hires have been banned at Goldman and Deutsche.”

Sentiment has worsened thanks to the profit warning at Macquarie.

This time last week, the Australian bank said it expected net profit to fall 25% in this financial year. More to the point, it painted a bleak picture of the third quarter: since June, it said global investment banking fees had fallen a further 8% on the previous three months, and were 30% below 2009 levels.

Macquarie’s figures don’t include sales and trading revenues, but they’ve nevertheless spooked banks who were hoping the third quarter would compensate for a disappointing Q2. “Macquarie have just helped clarify what the last few months were really like,” says the markets headhunter.

Any London fixed income hiring that does happen before December 2010 is expected to be far outside the major players.

“RBC are still building out, but very, very selectively. BBVA may still have a few hires to do, but even Jefferies has virtually shut down its investment banking until the end of this year,” says the head of one boutique.