Wall Street is bracing for another big round of layoffs. UBS (UBS) may lay out plans to cut as many as 8,000 jobs when it reports first-quarter earnings Tuesday, Bloomberg reports. A third of those firings may cut in the Swiss bank’s investment banking unit, which is due for a 10% staff cut. As Fortune.com’s Roddy Boyd recently noted, UBS’ $38 billion in subprime trading losses have finally put an end to the firm’s global ambitions.

The news comes as big firms such as UBS, Merrill Lynch (MER) and Citi (C) struggle to digest billions of dollars of mortgage-related writedowns and deal with a dimming profit picture. Merrill and Citi each have cut thousands of jobs, and more pink slips seem certain to follow when JPMorgan Chase (JPM) completes its purchase of Bear Stearns (BSC) later this year. The risk now is that the widespread loss of high-paying jobs threatens to turn what Alan Greenspan recently called a “pale recession” into something darker.

Morgan Stanley (MS) is cutting 1,000 jobs as it scales back its residential mortgage business. The move comes as no surprise, given the sharp pullback in the housing market over the past year. Morgan Stanley rivals such as Bear Stearns (BSC) made deep cuts in their own mortgage businesses last year as the mortgage market ground to a halt.

The mortgage crisis has already had a lasting impact on Morgan Stanley: In December, the firm took a $9.4 billion writedown of mortgage-related securities and bid adieu to Zoe Cruz, the executive who had been seen as the heir apparent to CEO John Mack. Morgan Stanley also raised $5 billion from Chinese investors to rebuild its capital base. Now, acknowledging the “continued dislocation in the mortgage markets,” the firm says it has “restructured our residential mortgage business to ensure we are appropriately positioned for the environment going forward.” That is, a much less forgiving environment.

The week ends on yet another a low note for Novastar (NFI). The subprime mortgage company fired 85 percent of its remaining staff and had its securities delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. The setbacks are hardly a shock, given that Novastar spent 2007 slashing jobs as its business - making high-cost loans to people with poor credit histories - collapsed under the weight of rising defaults. At Friday’s closing price of $2.92 a share, Novastar has lost 95 percent of its value since a year ago. The stock has also lost almost two-thirds of its value since the day in mid-October when the NYSE began delisting procedures. Novastar has turned into such a debacle that even the CEO got thrown out last month, though the company’s press release politely said he was leaving. Now almost everyone else who was at Novastar is out on the streets, too - though chances are good that most people didn’t get a nice severance payment the way ex-chief Scott Hartman did.

Another day, another makeover at Avon (AVP). The cosmetics firm said Tuesday it will cut 2,400 jobs in the latest phase of what has become a three-year-long facelift. The move comes as CEO Andrea Jung struggles to regain the magic that made the stock such a highflier early in her tenure. As amply noted in the pages of Fortune, Avon shares more than tripled between Jung’s 1999 appointment as chief executive and 2004. Since then, the stock has gone nowhere amid mounting competition from the likes of Procter & Gamble (PG) and slowing growth rates industrywide. Now, in the wake of thousands of job cuts and countless streamlining memos, the company pledges to be even nimbler - but to what effect? That’s not clear. Says Vice Chairman Charles Cramb, “Continuing transformation as part of a turnaround mentality is now a ‘way of life’ for Avon.” We’ll say.

The coffee wars are really heating up now. Starbucks (SBUX), under fire for the last year as rivals like McDonald’s (MCD) took aim at the expensive-coffee market, late Monday said Chairman Howard Schultz, who ran the company between 1987 and 2000, will return to grab the reins as CEO. He’ll replace Jim Donald, whose many stumbles included the inexplicable claim last year that he welcomed McDonald’s arrival in the market. In addition to putting Schultz back in charge, Starbucks is taking a page out of Wal-Mart’s (WMT) by slowing its U.S. store growth, and emulating McDonald’s by promising to put the customer first once again. The company says the changes will have the effect of “refocusing the company on providing customers with the distinctive Starbucks Experience [italics theirs] and building on Starbucks legacy of innovation.” With the stock up 7 percent late Monday, it’s hard to argue with the decision - even if providing customers a better experience will be more difficult than talking up the Starbucks Experience.

Talbots (TLB) is done kidding around. The struggling apparel retailer said Friday it would shut down its children’s and men’s stores to focus on its longtime core business of selling women’s clothes. The move will lead to 78 store closings - 66 kids stores and 12 men’s stores - and the loss of 800 jobs. Talbots began selling men’s clothes through its catalog business in 2002 and started opening men’s stores the next year, as its women’s apparel business slowed. At the same time, Talbots was expanding its children’s clothing business. But the company said Friday that “these concepts did not demonstrate the potential to deliver acceptable long-term return on investment.”

If that’s not enough, the company says fourth-quarter sales for its Talbots and J. Jill brands are “trending below its expectations.” As a result, Talbots - which has seen its stock lose 60 percent of its value over the last year - is continuing a review of strategic business plans and expects to report back in March. Don’t be surprised to see more cutbacks then.

This just in from Fortune’s Suzanne Kapner:

Macy’s (M) delivered an inauspicious holiday gift to 900 employees this afternoon, when the huge department store retailer disclosed plans to close nine stores.
 
Like other department store retailers, Macy’s has suffered from lackluster sales this holiday season. To try to spur last minute holiday shopping, the company took the unusual step of keeping eight stores in the metro New York area open round the clock in the days leading up to Christmas.
 
But, in fact, Macy’s troubles date back further, to the 2005 acquisition of the May Department Stores. In the wake of that deal Macy’s, formerly known as Federated Department Stores, closed dozens of overlapping stores.
 
Given the company’s middling performance this year, analysts had suspected that further store closings were in the works. In an interview earlier this month, Macy’s Chief Executive Terry Lundgren told Fortune: “We always go through the normal process of pruning our real estate portfolio, but there are no plans for a wide-scale closure of stores.”
 
Despite Macy’s troubles, the company continues to open stores in areas it considers more promising. Macy’s opened 10 new department stores in 2007 and one furniture gallery. Some five stores are expected to open in 2008 and six to eight new locations are on the table for 2009.
 
The stores slated for closure, in Ohio, Texas, Louisiana, Indiana and Utah, are located in regions that have been some of the weakest for Macy’s. The company said it would try to relocate displaced employees to nearby stores when possible - cold comfort for the remaining Macy’s workers who will start the New Year jobless.
 

Michelle Leder makes a good point at footnoted.org about the disclosure disconnect at mortgage lender Novastar (NFI). The company issued a press release last week announcing that CEO Scott Hartman and finance chief Gregory Metz “will leave the company.” But two days later, in its SEC filing on the subject, Novastar said the two had been “terminated.”

The shift prompts Leder to wonder, “Why would NovaStar not just state the facts the first time around? I mean it’s not as if anyone would be surprised that a company might want to fire the folks who were running the show when the stock dropped through the floor.”

And indeed, disclosure shortfalls are far from the biggest problem at Novastar. The company’s business has collapsed along with the implosion of the subprime mortgage market. Novastar recently posted a third-quarter loss of $64.05 a share, which helps to explain why it has seen its shares drop to $3 and change recently from a reverse split-adjusted $107 apiece at this time last year.

As for the difference between leaving and being terminated, no one answered the phone Friday at Novastar. But note the last line of boilerplate in recent Novastar press releases: “This press release speaks only as of its date and we expressly disclaim any duty to update the information herein.” It seems like that’s not the only duty Novastar’s flacks are disclaiming.

Losses are mounting at Washington Mutual (WM). The Seattle-based mortgage lender set plans Monday to cut more than 3,000 jobs in a bid to reduce costs as U.S. house sales continue their free fall. WaMu is also selling $2.5 billion worth of preferred stock to shore up its capital base and slashing its dividend by 73%.

WaMu is the third big financial firm to announce a capital replenishment plan Monday. Earlier, brokerage UBS (UBS) raised $11.5 billion in a deal with investors led by Singapore’s investment fund and bond insurer MBIA (MBI) scored a $1 billion stock sale to private equity firm Warburg Pincus. Shares of both companies rose on the news, which investors took as evidence that there is plenty of capital available, even for struggling financial firms, at the right price.

But WaMu’s news is likely to be less well received, considering the dire forecasts the bank is making. WaMu said it will close more than half the home-loan unit’s sales centers, as WaMu prepares for a 40% drop in 2008 U.S. mortgage originations. The company plans a $1.6 billion goodwill writedown on its home loans business, a fourth-quarter loan loss provision of $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion, and a first-quarter loan loss provision as high as $2 billion.

Just a month ago, WaMu was projecting total loan losses for the fourth and first quarters of around $2.6 billion. Now it sees those losses about a billion dollars higher. The shift brings to mind comments CEO Kerry Killinger made at last month’s investor day. “We’ve taken every measure possible to mitigate the effects of the current environment,” he said, but “no one knows for sure what’s going to happen.” That’s all too obvious by now.

Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) is swinging the ax. The big pharmaceuticals company said Wednesday it will cut 10% of its staff in what it grandly calls a “productivity transformation initiative.” The firings and related moves will save Bristol $1.5 billion annually by 2010, the company says. In cutting back Bristol-Myers joins rivals such as Pfizer (PFE), which earlier this year set plans to cut 10,000 jobs, and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), which has targeted 5,000 job cuts. A 10% cut at Bristol-Myers should mean the loss of about 4,300 jobs, going by figures on Yahoo! Finance.

Bristol is also dropping some businesses that don’t fit with its new focus on becoming what it calls “a next-generation BioPharma company,” and says it plans on making more strategic acquisitions in specialty medicines and biologics. So far, Wall Street is unimpressed: Shares dropped 1% in midday trading.