He could be the unluckiest man on Wall Street. A financier desperate to find work has seen six job offers evaporate in quick succession - four of them thanks to the financial crash.

Chuck, who asked for his surname to be withheld, has seen his prospects fall victim to two bank failures, the near-collapse of another and a fourth firm making mass redundancies.

A director at the British bank HSBC who said he would hire him retired before he could do so - and on the sixth occasion, Chuck lost out to a better-qualified candidate.

When he graduated with an MBA from the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid last December, Chuck, 30, had few doubts that he would find a job when he headed home to New York.

Chuck’s first interview was with Bear Stearns. On the day of his interview, The Wall Street Journal ran a story claiming the former chief executive Jimmy Cayne had smoked pot and played cards while the firm’s hedge funds collapsed - Cayne later denied pot-smoking.

Chuck was still waiting to hear back from the firm when it went belly up, the first investment bank to be wiped out by the credit crunch.

Three weeks ago, Chuck received an offer from Lehman Brothers, before it too crashed and burnt. Morgan Stanley stepped in but withdrew an offer after its stock price tanked on speculation that it would be the next bank to crumble in the crisis.

Two weeks ago, a managing director at HSBC took Chuck out for a round of golf. He liked what he saw and offered him an interview. When Chuck made a follow-up call, however, he discovered the banker had taken early retirement.

A family friend then organised an interview for Chuck at GFI Group, a New York-based broker and financial information firm.

At 4pm on September 9, Chuck went for his interview - only half an hour later, GFI called off merger talks and the company was hit hard by nervous sellers. The job was no longer available. “They couldn’t have been nicer about it,” he said.

Another firm, Market Access, shortlisted him to head up its technology division. Chuck lost out to a candidate with more experience. “Last week the whole division was laid off,” he said.

Chuck, who spent six years with IBM before deciding he wanted to move into finance, said he had been to more than 100 interviews at 40 firms in the past 10 months. “No one says, ‘We don’t have a job for you’,” he said. “They say, ‘We’re not making any plans right now’, or, ‘Keep in touch’.

“I feel like Wall Street is going to start blaming me for all its problems.”

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