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Title: Return of Mass Layoffs a Grim Sign for U.S. Workers
Source:
Yahoo Finance
URL Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/dail ... -sign-u-workers-190228219.html
Published: Jul 22, 2011
Author: Aaron Task
Post Date: 2011-07-22 13:42:27 by jwpegler
Keywords: None
Views: 1862
Comments: 2
Putting pressure on an already lousy job market, the mass layoff is making a comeback. In the past week, Cisco, Lockheed Martin and Borders announced a combined 23,000 in job cuts. Those announcements follow 41,432 in planned cuts in June, up 11.6% from May and 5.3% vs. a year earlier, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Meanwhile, state and local governments have cut 142,000 jobs this year, The WSJ reports, and Wall Street is braced for another round of cutbacks. This week, Goldman Sachs announced plans to let go 1000 fixed-income traders. If these trends continue, we may soon be talking about losses in the monthly employment data -- not just disappointing growth, says Howard Davidowitz, CEO of Davidowitz & Associates "Everything in business is confidence," Davidowitz says. "You lose confidence and businesses can't deal with that [and] who could have confidence with what's going on in Washington?" Davidowitz is bipartisan in his criticism, calling the U.S. political system "dysfunctional and deranged." Still, the restructuring expert is a longtime and vocal critic of President Obama: "There has never been in a situation in my lifetime where a guy increases the debt by 40%, GDP growth is on the way down, Food Stamps are up, millions more are unemployed -- and to accomplish this we spent $4 trillion." But it's an open question whether any president or policy mix could do much to revive the economy after the bursting of the credit bubble. In This Time is Different, co-authors Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart demonstrate that financial crises are typically followed by severe recessions, slow recoveries, subpar growth and greater frequency of recessions in the decade following the crisis. (See: Bernanke In Denial About Economy's Fate, Vincent Reinhart Says) "No one believes the economy, Obama or not, is going to improve," my Breakout colleague Jeff Macke says in the accompanying clip. "Time [is] the only thing that heals."
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#1. To: jwpegler (#0)
(Edited)
Don't worry, Brian S(ocialist) will be along shortly, to post all kinds of rosy articles, saying "recovery is just around the corner." It used to be the leftists that had bumper-stickers that said things like "Question Authority.' Today they follow Orwells' mottos: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. They blindly LOVE Big Brother. They believe competition, pride & profiting from ones labor, are evil things to be banished. Stephen King once observed, "The beauty of religion mania is that it has the power to explain everything... [and] …logic can be happily tossed out the window. This describes socialists. They will ignore logic and "common sense." They will ignore REALITY. Because THEY are religious zealots... Their God... is the STATE.
Maybe slowing the economy by immediately cutting $140 billion a month in spending isn't such a good idea?
Tagline for sale - inquire within
#2. To: jwpegler (#0)
(Edited)
"No one believes the economy, Obama or not, is going to improve," my Breakout colleague Jeff Macke says in the accompanying clip. "Time [is] the only thing that heals."
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