LOS ANGELES, Sept. 22 (Xinhua) -- With major Wall Street investment banks going bankruptcy or being acquired in the worst dramatic reshuffle of U.S. financial landscape since the Great Depression, Los Angeles as the financial center on the West Coast is feeling the pain no less than its New York counterpart.

    Panicked investors phoned their brokers these days as the stock market tumbled to its multi-year lows, while customers fretted over their insurance policies after the troubled insurance giant American International Group was bailed out by the government.

    And the current financial turmoil, which is the result of the one-year-old subprime mortgage crisis, is significantly shrinking the fortune of many of Los Angeles' wealthiest residents, and could even jeopardize the region's important philanthropic community.

    Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad, who sold his financial company to AIG in 1999, had 800 million dollars worth of AIG stock two months ago, but now the stake is worth only 72 million dollars, according to the latest issue of the Los Angeles Business Journal published on Monday.

    Broad is a leading philanthropist in Los Angeles with major donations to art museums, schools and science institutes. He announced earlier this month to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to support medical research projects and build a new stem cell research center.

    It is ironical that many of those toxic home loans that are making the country's largest financial institutions no longer exist were made and sold here in Southern California, where housing prices had been among the highest in the country and the leading subprime mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp. was based.

    And for the Los Angeles area, the new crisis came just month after the upheaval caused by its position as ground zero for the subprime fiasco, which saw the buyout of Countrywide Financial by the Bank of America and the failure of other mortgage lenders and loss of thousands of local jobs.

    Although the new wave of job losses is likely to be felt most severely in Wall Street, Los Angeles will not escape unscathed. Investment banks like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers had been keeping significant local presence with hundreds of employees working at their branch offices across the area.