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Ponce
22nd July 2011, 04:34 PM
First Posy of the day........Good morning,afternoon or what ever, to one and all.
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..Return of Mass Layoffs a Grim Sign for U.S. Workers.

..By Aaron Task
Thu, Jul 21, 2011 3:02 PM EDT
....
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. (See: Another Retailer Bites the Dust: Borders Doomed by Amazon Deal, Davidowitz Says)

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." (See: "A Bunch of Morons in Washington": Howard Davidowitz Handicaps the Debt Ceiling Debate)

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."

What do you think?

Gaillo
22nd July 2011, 05:12 PM
Green shoots everywhere...

http://www.myinvestmentanalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/green-shoots.gif

http://paul.kedrosky.com/WindowsLiveWriter/WhatGreenShootsinRetailLookLike_9280/green-shoots_thumb.png

Dogman
22nd July 2011, 05:16 PM
The trane a/c plant was closed here in Tyler , this week. Over 500 jobs went by by.

vacuum
22nd July 2011, 05:22 PM
So this could conceivably push metals down (more deflation like what happened in 08 ).

keehah
25th July 2011, 05:27 AM
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/25/qt

Atlantic Union College has issued layoff notices to all employees, effective July 31, The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported. The college, in Massachusetts, has been in the process of becoming a branch of Washington Adventist University, in Maryland. But delays by Massachusetts officials in approving the merger have left Atlantic Union without the resources to continue

RIM to cut about 2,000 jobs Postmedia News Jul 25, 2011 (http://business.financialpost.com/2011/07/25/rim-to-cut-about-2000-jobs/)

Emanuel Defends Decision to Lay Off [600 Chicago] City Workers (http://chicagoist.com/2011/07/24/emanuel_defends_decision_to_lay_off.php)

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/business/breakingnews/nashville-incentives-for-iqt-on-hold-following-1200-canadian-layoffs.html

A U.S. company that infuriated its Canadian workers by suddenly laying them off without their final paycheque has now lost a major deal with the City of Nashville.
The Tennessee capital made the announcement Tuesday, several days after IQT Solutions announced it was chopping 1,200 Canadian jobs without warning.
http://www.space.com/12391-space-shuttle-program-nasa-workers-layoffs.html

Now that NASA's space shuttles are grounded for good, many of the jobs that kept the iconic program going will pass into history as well.

Today (July 22), NASA is expected to begin issuing layoff notices to about 3,200 contractors, agency officials have said.