SPOTTING an opening in the global fight for talent, China's ambitious financial institutions are planning recruiting trips to London and Wall Street, on the wounded financial titans' home turf.

Sovereign fund China Investment Corporation has begun a global search; multi-billion-dollar Chinese-French fund Fortune SGAM plans interviews on Wall Street; and Shanghai's government is headed to London and New York next month with job offers in hand.

Chief executive Pei Changjiang of the Fortune SGAM Fund told AFP: 'There have been layoffs on Wall Street since the crisis but China's financial industry is still in its infancy and is hungry for talent.'

It is estimated that the economic turmoil could cost 165,000 jobs in New York over the next two years, while British think tank Oxford Economics predicts 194,000 job cuts in London over the same period.

But from Shanghai, the message to the brightest finance minds is clear: China is hiring.

Mr Han Zheng, mayor of China's rapidly growing economic hub, has previously said that by 2010 - when Shanghai hosts the World Expo - the city will have an infrastructure worthy of a global financial hub. By 2020, he said, the city will be one.

More than 600 financial institutions had offices in Shanghai at the beginning of the year but finance jobs account for only 2.4 per cent of the 9.1 million- strong workforce, compared to 11 per cent in London and 12.7 per cent in New York.

The Shanghai city government will be hiring for more than 80 positions in leading banks, insurers, securities firms and asset-management firms.

Meanwhile, the US$200-billion (S$295-billion) China Investment Corporation (CIC) advertised more than 30 positions, ranging from fixed-income investment to stock analysis.

SGAM, a joint venture between state-run steelmaker Shanghai Baosteel Group's investment arm and French bank Societe Generale, confirmed it was sending a team to the United States to look for good-quality hires. However, it would not say how many, or who the ideal candidates might be.

The biggest deterrent for the finance world's smartest, however, is likely to be the over-regulation and bureaucracy that come with working for firms that are controlled by the state or state-run firms, experts said.

Said economist Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin: 'Financial experts are unlikely to want to work in a state-owned enterprise unless that enterprise has a tremendous amount of autonomy. I'm not sure CIC, for instance, has that autonomy.'

But with US$1.9 trillion in foreign reserves, China is in an unrivalled position to pursue its ambitions to expand its financial sector and that presents an amazing opportunity to deal-makers, said Ms Linda Stewart, head of Epoch, a Boston- based financial-services recruiter.

'At this time, China is holding all the cards - and all the US currency,' she said.