Thursday, April 1, 2010

Corporate layoffs back to normal


Corporate layoff announcements are firmly in "normal" territory, according to the latest data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The awful national nightmare that began in late 2008 is over.

1 comment:

Benjamin Cole said...

Die recession, die, die, die!

True story. I rent industrial space to small bumper repair shop. They repair plastic auto bumpers (using lots of bondo).

A facility that one of the guys used to work at used to do 90 bumpers a day. Now they are down to 25 bumpers a day.

I have heard many stories like this is the last couple years--not 10 percent declines, but 50 percent declines. Of course, container traffic at the huge LA-LB harbor fell by nearly 40 percent y-o-y at the worst point.

Grannis' word "nightmare" is right. If you live in the real world, have a job related to real estate, or manufacturing, or you rent out space, you saw a collapse, not a recession.

I am sure many people woke up in cold sweats. Years of careful financial planning and investment (in my case, a small industrial property) looked like it would evaporate. And yet I did nothing wrong, I was not overleveraged, I showed up for work, I tended to details etc. I am lucky--I did not get crushed. Many others did.

What is the incentive to invest if the financial system can collapse? Surely, others feel the same way.

The collapse of our financial system--that simply cannot be allowed to happen again.

This strikes me as a prime failing of Obama--while he is mucking around propping up a corrupt narco-state in Afghanistan, and working on a dubious health care plan, there has been no clear policy statement from him that a set of rules and reserve requirements has been adopted to strengthen beyond doubt our financial system.