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)
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Return of Mass Layoffs a Grim Sign for U.S. Workers | Daily Ticker - Yahoo! Finance
Friday, July 22, 2011
Norway police say gunman kills at least 80 youths | Reuters
OSLO |
(Reuters) - A gunman shot dead at least 80 youths at a summer camp of the ruling Labour Party on Friday, police said.OSLO
"The updated knowledge we are sitting on now is at least 80," police chief Oystein Maeland told a news conference. "We can't guarantee that won't increase somewhat," he said, adding some were badly injured.
Previously, police had said that at least 10 had been killed in the shooting at the Utoeya island northwest of Oslo, along with seven killed by a bomb blast in central Oslo.
Maeland said the attack had reached "catastrophic dimensions."
Police: At least 80 killed in Norwegian youth camp shooting | Detroit Free Press | freep.com
OSLO, Norway — Police say at least 80 people were killed in a shooting spree at the youth camp of Norway's Labor Party.
Police director Oystein Maeland told reporters early Saturday they had discovered many more victims after initially reporting the death toll at 10.
Maeland couldn't say how many people were injured in the shooting.
Hundreds of youth were attending the summer camp organized by the youth wing of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's Labor Party on the island of Utoya.
Debt talks break down; "We have run out of time" - Political Hotsheet - CBS News
With eleven days before the August 2 deadline, talks to negotiate a deal to raise the debt limit have broken down, leaving the United States on the cusp of a possible economic catastrophe.
"We have run out of time," Mr. Obama said in acknowledging the breakdown.
House Speaker John Boehner walked away from negotiations Friday, complaining that Mr. Obama would not agree to Republican demands that the deal not include any tax increases. Shortly after Boehner made his decision public, Mr. Obama, appearing frustrated, appeared before reporters to explain what had been on the table and hammer Boehner for walking away from an "extraordinarily fair deal."
The deal on the table, as Mr. Obama laid it out, included more than $1 trillion in cuts to domestic and defense discretionary spending, as well as $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs - Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. He said he asked for approximately $1.2 trillion in revenue increases that he said would have come from eliminating loopholes and deductions and engaging in broad tax reform, not hiking tax rates.
The deal, he said, called for less in tax increases than the deal worked out by the bipartisan "Gang of Six" negotiators, while including as much in discretionary savings. He said if the deal was unbalanced, "it was unbalanced in the direction of not enough revenue."