by Patrick McGeehan

Expecting a national recession to compound the effects of the Wall Street crisis, the New York City comptroller’s office is now forecasting that the city will lose 165,000 private-sector jobs over the next two years.

That would be almost twice as many as the comptroller’s office had projected three months ago, when it said that about 85,000 jobs would be lost. The difference, according to the comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., is that the nation has slipped into a general recession with effects that will spread far beyond the financial services sector and across the whole city economy.

About one-fifth of those lost jobs, about 35,000, will come in investment banking and other financial services, according to the revised forecast. The previous projection was for a loss of 25,000 jobs in financial services, or almost one-third of the expected total.

The financial-services sector has had one of the biggest declines this year, while some sectors — including construction and tourism-related businesses — continued to add jobs through the summer. But the comptroller’s new forecast envisions significant cutbacks in those fields as a recession lingers and the cutbacks on Wall Street ripple outward.

“Some of this is a combination of the financial-market downturn, the credit crunch that’s having an effect on small businesses and the rest of the nation finally catching up with New York,” Mr. Thompson said. “While this is perhaps more abrupt than the last recession, we don’t think it’s going to be as prolonged.”

Mr. Thompson also said he expected that the rebounding dollar would lead to a reduction in tourism here. “Tourism has been up because the euro has been so strong, but in the last few weeks you’ve seen the euro tumble against the dollar,” he said.

The projected losses would amount to about 5 percent of all private-sector jobs in the city, but they would not be as great as in the last recession. In the downturn that lasted from 2001 into 2003, the city lost about 235,000 jobs, according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Ronnie Lowenstein, director of the New York City Independent Budget Office, said her office had not updated its forecast of the city economy since the financial crisis worsened this fall. But she said she agreed with the view that the national recession would weigh heavily on a local economy, already beset by the devastation of its leading industry.

“We’re facing a problem that’s both cyclical and structural,” Ms. Lowenstein said. “We’re going to be affected by the U.S. downturn but there are going to be long-term changes in the financial sector that are going to affect us well beyond this recession. It’s likely that those structural changes will be accompanied by a smaller financial-activities sector than we’ve seen in recent years.”