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I believe the majority of analysts who forecast GDP expect a recession in the not too distant future. Well, if that happens, let's try to remember to revisit this thread and make Blackman eat crow.
I know of very few who are not forecasting a recession, or who do not at least think the probability of a downturn beginning sometime this year is very high.
And you are........ Thank God you don't farm or we would all starve.
Thank God you are not a scientist or Doctor or we would all be infected with CoVid19. Since the death rate of CoVid19 is around 1%, 3,300,000 of us would be dead.
Bidenomics: Total Tech Layoffs in 2023 Already Cross 190,000, Surpassing Year 2022
by Jim Hoft May. 7, 2023 5:40 pm
The Biden effect.
Industry-leading commentary on global financial markets, the Kobeissi Letter, has published its data on tech layoffs for 2023.
According to their analysis, this year’s layoffs have already topped 190,000. This is a significant increase from 2022’s total of 165,000.
“January marked the most tech layoffs in a month since 2001, impacting 89,500 employees. Total tech layoffs since 2022 are now at 355,000 employees from 1,700 companies,” Kobeissi Letter wrote on its Twitter.
“The number of layoffs accelerated beginning in Nov. 2022. Over the last 7 months alone, total tech layoffs are now at 255,000 employees. Most companies have cited cost cutting and economic uncertainty as reasons behind the layoffs,” it added.
Below is the breakdown of tech layoffs by month:
Companies that deal directly with consumers and retailers continue to feel the greatest impact from layoffs, according to Kobeissi Letter’s data.
Surprisingly, the transportation industry has also been hit hard.
As interest rates climb and inflation remains high, consumers are cutting back on their spending.
According to their analysis, this pattern is predicted to continue in 2023.
The facts are the vaccines worked if you bothered to take one. There have been very FEW "Break through deaths from CoVid". A Break through death is defined as someone who got the vaccine (Merk or Pfizer two shot, Johnson and Johnson on shot) and died from CoVid during the protection period.
Out of 184 million vaccinated people there were only 7,000 break through deaths. The link is dated Oct 2021. Six thousand of those deaths the person was over 65 years old.
The reason there were just as many deaths under Biden as Trump was the vaccines were available but people did not get the shot. In Trumps last year in office the vaccines were not available until after Trump left office. When Trump got infected and got the Regeneron Antibodies, that was still experimental and not available to the general public yet.
Say! That's a nice income you have there. Sure would be a shame if it doesn't cover your expenses
Do the Hustle. Side Hustle that is...
Quote:
Top Economist Warns The Next Recession Will Be As If “The Whole Country Takes A Pay Cut”
by Mac Slavo | May 3, 2023 | Headline News
Ever since the United States Federal Reserve (the central bank) began hiking interest rates in early 2022 to “combat inflation”, fears of recession have grown. But the next recession is going to be an ugly one, and it will appear as if “the whole country take a pay cut” according to former Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg, who is also the president of Rosenberg Research.
“The leading indicators are telling me that the recession is actually starting this quarter,” he said in a recent YouTube interview with Blockworks Macro. “If it’s not this quarter I think it’s next quarter. It’s certainly not a 2024 story.”
With rampant inflation, most Americans are struggling with wages that are not keeping up with the rising cost of living. Should a recession materialize, it could result in greater financial hardships. Not only that but artificial intelligence and automation are going to make it tough for people in the future.
“A recession is a very big call because it is actually a haircut to national income. It’s as if the whole country takes a pay cut,” Rosenberg explained according to Yahoo News. “It’s not that we take the Lamborghini from 80 down to 20. It’s that we go in reverse.”
“I am bearish on equities as an asset class,” Rosenberg said, adding that he doesn’t believe “a recession is fully priced in. I don’t like the valuations. I mean, we’re pressing against a 19 forward multiple,” he said, referring to the forward price-to-earnings ratio. “So what does that get you? Like 5.3% as an earnings yield. I can pick up 5.4[%] in single-A triple-B corporate credit … wind up in a better part of the capital structure.”
The S&P 500 currently sits at 4,169 and the economist’s target implies a downside of 23%. “It will be painful if you’re long, but if you have the dry powder and the liquidity, you’ll be able to pick up assets at better levels as you always do in a recession,” Rosenberg said.
In other words, when the recession comes and stocks tumble, investors can take advantage of better prices by buying the dip…if you have the capital to do so. Most Americans are struggling now. If a recession hits, it’ll hit the lower-income people the hardest.
“The beauty of recessions is that they cleanse, and they move assets from weak hands to strong hands,” he said.
If Trump fucked anything up, which I believe he did, ...........................
BTW, why did more people die from Covid under Biden, even when he was handed several vaccines? Here’s a hint: Covid is gonna Covid, and there isn’t a damn thing we could’ve done about it. We sacrificed our economy, which could take a generation to recover, for nothing.
There were supply chain problems during the Trump administration. Trump believed the Federal Gov is not a shipping clerk, while hospitals were forced to ration disposeable equipment.
Do I expect the economy to enter a recession soon? Why_Yes_I_Do!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Why_Yes_I_Do
Do the Hustle. Side Hustle that is... Remember: Opportunity exists in panic.
Yes, indeed!
Although I'm not sure widespread panic is imminent, there are warning lights flashing all over the dashboard, and I think we'll see myriad problems soon enough.
Amid this, the S&P 500 is down only about 14% from its all-time high at the beginning of 2022. Don't you think investors are far too sanguine?
The narrative and video WYID posted above is from an interview with economist Dave Rosenberg, publisher of the excellent "Breakfast with Dave" report that comes out around 8 every weekday morning. It's always one of my favorite reads of the day.
For months now, he's been making the case that the unemployment rate is one of the laggiest of lagging indicators, and that it rarely bottoms until a recession is just over the horizon or even underway.
Remember, many firms "hoard" labor these days, since it's very expensive to lay people off only to need to hire them back a year or so later. By that time, it's usually necessary to hire (and train anew) a whole different set of workers.
Once again, go look at December of 1969, when the unemployment rate bottomed at 3.5% and it was later seen that a recession began that very month.
"Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes!"
And, as Rosenberg says, recessions are cleansing processes, wherein malinvestment is swept away and the ownership of good assets transferred to stronger hands.
It's clear that nothing in the way of recession expectations is remotely priced in to today's markets.
If history offers any guidance (as it usually does!), monetary policy in the form of tightening acts with long and variable lags, often of 6-12 months. There's a good argument here that the lag may be longer than usual, owing to the excess savings arising from the humongously over-the-top $1.9 billion fiscal surge passed in March 2021.
At great cost, this possibly bought the economy some additional time, as household bank accounts get drawn down. Thus the typical 6-12 month lag could get stretched to 12-18.
Cautious, value-seeking investors would therefore do well to be very patient. You could see some very attractive opportunities within the next 12 months. The most successful investors always endeavor to capitalize on bear markets, recessions, financial crises, and busts.
So, do I agree with Rosenberg's take that a recession and concomitant market selloff is baked into the pie?
Work'n in the coal mine. Going down, down, down...
Awwwwwe... Regarding the labor, i.e. employment, side of the equation. What you mentioned about the reticence ("hording") of laying-off of skilled talent is true when it's believed to be a bump in the road period. In the past, company wide lay-offs (across the board hair cuts) were also a handy-dandy way to scooch out the older, higher paid, talent. By now, the lion's share of the Boomers are out or moving out of the workforce. The covid helped accelerate that, BTW.
What is next is a squeeze on the bottom-end employment - IMMHO. There is an article out last week about Wendy's using AI Chat bots for order takers. Those jobs are, soon to be were, much lower paying. And of course, there is automation coming to those work places also because of wage increases, but also for consistency reasons. Weird aside; I still see some Popeye's fast-food restaurants that have not opened up the in house dining or ordering, presumably for cost cutting reasons at this point.
One other hiring practice to cover - the employee pipeline. I tend to call it the fake jobs, the what-if jobs, the hope we find a unicorn jobs. Is the job you are applying for even actually available? I've been in companies during heavy lay-offs. One of the first things that happens is that all job postings are cancelled and the hiring manager has to go through a process to justify getting one reactivated, i.e. refunded. It is hard to get a hiring rec, but much harder to re-justify it during a down sizing. Back in the day, it was often in hopes of placing workers within the company for the reasons you mentioned (hoarding, retention, not starting anew) previously. But most don't seem to do that now a days. Now it's all about the short term bottom line.
The point being, the job posting will still show on the external interfaces, internets, job boards and what not and often even their own internal sites. But many are ghost jobs. A similar but different example from the Ross Perot days was how they would post jobs that they didn't even have yet. They would be bidding on large outsourcing contracts, which take a long time and require a smorgasbord of skill sets. As negotiations moved closer, they would start posting tons of jobs for various skills to be ahead of the curve should they win the contract.
I don't even want to drill into the "migrant class" workers streaming in at the moment, but I will say it will skew the labor participation rate a fair bit, while clogging up the housing needs and placing downward pressure (competition) on labor rates. I doubt they will automatically be included as work force "participants" because of their sketchy status and general desire to stay under the radar. In short, it's an unknown work force, but I generally don't see them as taking any high end, white collar, jobs. Regardless, they are mouths that need fed and they will be dropping babies aplenty in short order. But in 7-10 years they might have a court date to decide if they can begin the 8-10 year process to become a citizen. Yah, right..
I would point out an interesting inflection (reflection) point in our history regarding what I called the "migrant class" We've been there before, right after the Civil War. A lot of people moved from South to North looking for paying jobs, for a change. BTW: they were willing to perform them for less $$ than the existing Northerners **cough** Yankees **cough**. Things took a very long time and a whole lot of effort (brutal at times) to settle from that previous experience. A glaring difference - we are not currently in a labor intensive industrial or manufacturing posture this time around.
FWIW: ye olde Okey-Doke shuffle, aka Communism, (below) ain't gonna get 'er dun either
Quote:
Originally Posted by Texas Contrarian
Yes, indeed!
Although I'm not sure widespread panic is imminent, there are warning lights flashing all over the dashboard, and I think we'll see myriad problems soon enough.
Amid this, the S&P 500 is down only about 14% from its all-time high at the beginning of 2022. Don't you think investors are far too sanguine?
The narrative and video WYID posted above is from an interview with economist Dave Rosenberg, publisher of the excellent "Breakfast with Dave" report that comes out around 8 every weekday morning. It's always one of my favorite reads of the day.
For months now, he's been making the case that the unemployment rate is one of the laggiest of lagging indicators, and that it rarely bottoms until a recession is just over the horizon or even underway.
Remember, many firms "hoard" labor these days, since it's very expensive to lay people off only to need to hire them back a year or so later. By that time, it's usually necessary to hire (and train anew) a whole different set of workers.
Once again, go look at December of 1969, when the unemployment rate bottomed at 3.5% and it was later seen that a recession began that very month.
"Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes!"
And, as Rosenberg says, recessions are cleansing processes, wherein malinvestment is swept away and the ownership of good assets transferred to stronger hands.
It's clear that nothing in the way of recession expectations is remotely priced in to today's markets.
If history offers any guidance (as it usually does!), monetary policy in the form of tightening acts with long and variable lags, often of 6-12 months. There's a good argument here that the lag may be longer than usual, owing to the excess savings arising from the humongously over-the-top $1.9 billion fiscal surge passed in March 2021.
At great cost, this possibly bought the economy some additional time, as household bank accounts get drawn down. Thus the typical 6-12 month lag could get stretched to 12-18.
Cautious, value-seeking investors would therefore do well to be very patient. You could see some very attractive opportunities within the next 12 months. The most successful investors always endeavor to capitalize on bear markets, recessions, fiscal crises, and busts.
So, do I agree with Rosenberg's take that a recession and concomitant market selloff is baked into the pie?
Maybe they just aren't all that in to us after all...
About all those large scale Tech layoffs (see above), well... that does not mean they are not hiring.
They just aren't hiring Americans.
Quote:
Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs
New disclosures released yesterday show Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other firms requesting foreign worker H-1B visas this year.
Lee Fang May 16, 2023
Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, wrote a solemn letter in January, announcing his company's decision to lay off 12,000 employees.
”I have some difficult news to share,” wrote Pichai. The layoff, he continued, "weighs heavily on me," and was forced by "economic reality."
Just one month later, Pichai’s firm filed applications for low-paid foreign workers to come to America and take highly specialized tech jobs. Google filed dozens of applications for foreign workers to serve as software engineers, analytical consultants, user experience researchers, and other roles. Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google, also filed and received visa applications for engineering jobs. Many of the Google visas are for new employees, with some starting as soon as August 17th.
Newly disclosed data released yesterday by the Department of Labor shows thousands of recent H1-B foreign worker visas requested by firms that just underwent massive layoffs this year, including Facebook/Meta Platforms, Amazon, Zoom, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Palantir...
