Mumbai: US investment bank Morgan Stanley will cut 1,000 jobs worldwide as the Wall Street giant scales back home-lending business in the US and shuts down its British mortgage unit.

The move comes as new management struggles to reposition the bank amid continued deterioration in the US mortgage market.

While the bank declined to detail the cuts, it is expected to affect Morgan Stanley employees who generate home loans through brokers and other third parties, as well as bankers who packaged these loans into bonds.

Morgan Stanley has so far laid off 2,900 people in mortgages, wealth management, investment banking and capital markets since October. The bank had 48,256 employees worldwide at the end of November.

In December, the bank reported a $9.4 billion write-down for the fourth quarter in losses linked to US sub-prime mortgages.

Morgan's latest cuts come about two months after co-president Zoe Cruz was forced out for her role overseeing a debt capital markets business following the huge fourth-quarter losses.

Jerker Johansson, vice chairman of the Morgan Stanley's European division, also joined Swiss banking group UBS. He will head UBS's troubled investment banking business on March 17.

Morgan Stanley joins well over 100 mortgage lenders that have slashed jobs or gone out of business in the last year.

Last month Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc cut 1,300 mortgage jobs and closed its wholesale lending business, for a total of 3,750 job cuts since June 2007.

Banks' exposure to the sub-prime mortgage market has resulted in about 25,000 job losses over the past six months.

Finance ministers from the G7 industrialised nations who met in Japan last week said losses from the US mortgage crisis could reach $400 billion.

The latest job losses are part of a series of cutbacks on Wall Street that indicate investment banks don't expect the mortgage crisis to end soon.