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Layoffs at Microsoft, Intel, and IBM
Normally I try to avoid posting straight business news, but I think that these 3 stories combine to something meaningful.
Muleguy noted Microsoft is laying off 5,000,
Mspangler reports that
Intel is cutting 5-6k, while
nonyabidness afraid4myjob submitted that IBM Layoffs have begun with no number, but estimates as high as 16,000.
So yesterday, IBM posted great profits that beat wall street estimates. And today they're doing layoffs? That makes no financial sense to me. Why should any company lay off people just because "Everyone else is doing it"?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Microsoft are cutting up to 5,000 from a total of 90,000 employees - 5.5% of its workforce.
IBM might cut 16,000 from a workforce of 387,000, a cut of 4%.
Intel are cutting up to 6,000 from a workforce of 84,000 - 7% of jobs.
Economists like to pretend that they're dealing with a hard science but they are wrong, so very wrong. Economics is certainly a complex field of study but it is also one of the squishiest sciences there is. Economics is psychology with graphs and math. You can talk about supply and demand, this curve and that, but we're ultimately talking about human psychology. You can't use normal logic to figure this stuff out, you have to work with crowd dynamics, herd instinct, quit talking about how people should behave and pay attention to how they really behave.
If you want to understand how everything is going pear-shaped, just look at the Great White club fire. Huge crowd, small venue, and the band's pyrotechnics set the place on fire. Rationally speaking, there's no reason why anyone had to die. There were sufficient doors and sufficient time for a calm and orderly evacuation. And our economists are the ones who would look at that situation and not quite grasp why there was a panic, a human log-jam at the door, and a whole lot of dead bodies. "That wasn't rational behavior! That was irrational exuberance, or maybe irrational shit-the-bed terror. The problem here is that my observations of this event do not fit my models."
That's what we're seeing in this economy, a fire in a club. Everyone is working to maximize their own survival even though it will harm the chances for the group as a whole. Companies are shedding jobs everywhere, getting work is damned near impossible, and we've got a negative feedback loop that nobody seems to be able to break. And nobody wants to take a look at the wall where the writing stands hundreds of feet high -- "we need to reform the way we're doing business and this will change our entire economy as we've come to know it." The thought is too frightening.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
To be fair, it was Hoover's fault. Not that he could know; most of the techniques we use today to try and mitigate the effects of a long term downturn weren't even invented during Hoover's administration. It wasn't (at that time) recognized that unregulated capitalism was perfectly capable of committing suicide.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It changed when your company went public. As soon as the first duty of the company changed from working owners to non-employee shareholders, employees are simply meaningless. As a shareholder of our own privately held firm, our employees are our number one asset. Layoffs, when necessary due to lower service demands, are keenly felt. If our firm was to go public, we would morph into the same heartless money machines as all other publicly traded firms. You want employees to matter? Don't go public.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
While it is unpleasant, at least Ballmer acknowledges it's happenning. At IBM (and as an IBMer), no-one has any official information. It seems like employees are being liquidated by a death squad and made into Orwellian 'unpersons' as their names disappear from 'Blupages' - the company directory.
I would rather get an offical word from the management folks ahead of time. I can only suspect IBM management is afraid of sabotage or people getting upset in public - from those that are to be shown the door. I can't think of any other reason for keeping us in the dark.
To quote Grand Moff Tarkin (sp?) - "Fear will keep the local systems in line..."
Nitpick
China did not buy much of mortgage backed securities - they did not need to, since most of banking and social security out there is government controlled. The gulf investors did buy tons of it though
On the other hand China did buy trillions of government debt from US. This allowed them to export tons of stuff into US while keeping a fixed exchange rate. And before you go Caveat Emptoring them, remember that they have not yet played their hands -- they could always dump that debt back on the market at any time.
And about "economies being separated the way they should be " - such strict separation only leads to eternal poverty for poor countries and slow decay for the rich. Japan may be the only country in the world to develop in relative isolation (not after 1945, but their first industrialisation).
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
Don't blame entire countries because of the people your out-sourcers end contracting. I'm in one of these countries, and I know how fast and bad executed are the recruiting for american companies. They don't expend more than between a day and a week searching. These HR firms are gold-diggers that know you guys have loads of money, and that you don't expect much, so they pick the first worker they think they can bullshit you in, and ask for a lot more than they pay for him.