6,600 jobs to be eliminated

Wellpoint Layoffs

m.apnews.com...

By TOM MURPHY and MARLEY SEAMAN Published: Today INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - WellPoint Inc. said Friday it will cut about 1,500 jobs, becoming the latest health insurer to take what analysts see as a tough-but-necessary step to cope with the recession. The Indianapolis-based insurer will eliminate about 3.5 percent of its staff, which currently totals more than 42,000. The cuts include 900 positions that are currently unfilled and 600 employees. WellPoint spokeswoman Kristin Binns said the cuts were made "across the board." "This reduction didn't affect any one specific area or function directly," she said. WellPoint has employees in 46 states, and the cuts will be felt in 25, Binns said, noting that they will be spread across the country.

AMD Layoffs
m.apnews.com...

By JORDAN ROBERTSON Published: 10 minutes ago SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. plans to cut 1,100 jobs, 9 percent of its global staff, and slash the remaining employees' pay as the chip maker hopes its third round of layoffs in a year can help it get through a brutal market for computer sales. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said Friday that 900 workers will have their positions cut. The rest of the reductions are coming from attrition and the previously announced sale of a business unit. The company has 15,000 workers currently, but it is spinning off its manufacturing operations, which have 3,000 employees who are not affected by Friday's announcement. So AMD's cut of 1,100 jobs amounts to 9 percent of the remaining 12,000 workers. The firings represent AMD's third round of major layoffs in the last year. AMD cut 600 workers just last month, and earlier in 2008 jettisoned 1,600.

Hertz Layoffs
m.apnews.com...

PARK RIDGE, N.J. (AP) - Rental car company Hertz Global Holdings Inc. said Friday it will eliminate more than 4,000 jobs worldwide as it further cuts costs amid slowing demand. The company expects to save $150 million to $170 million this year and take a related fourth-quarter charge of $20 million to $25 million. Hertz already has trimmed its work force by 22 percent in the last two years. The new reductions will bring staffing to 32 percent below August 2006 levels. According to CapitalIQ, the company currently has about 29,350 workers in total, who operate about 8,100 locations in 144 countries. The company said the latest round of eliminations, which will take place in its fiscal 2008 fourth quarter and first quarter of 2009, will come in its car and equipment rental operations as well as corporate and support areas. The reductions will occur across all regions. Chairman and Chief Executive Mark P. Frissora said in a statement that Hertz is still committed to its global airport and off-airport car rental and equipment rental businesses and will add the "necessary resources" when operating conditions get better.

This is just compounding by the day. B of A, Intel, Circuit City, and several other companies that employ large groups of people are making cuts. By the end of the month I expect nearly 1 million additional cuts in employment to be made. This will cause Barack Obama's Economic Stimulus plan to balloon beyond the trillion dollar mark. And it won't get better. We are going to see double digit unemployment by the end of the quarter let alone by the middle of the year. God help us, because after that, it's inflation, inflation, inflation. You will see 1/3 of US banks collapse within the next 3 months as well, which will further put people out of work. The bottom is not here and we won't see it for years to come.

If Obama's 850 billion economic simulus plan is to seriously work, each one of the 350 million people in this country deserves a 1 million dollar check. That will fix the economy and put things back on track.

The 850 billion economic stimulus package can surely afford to send every American taxpayer a 1 million dollar, tax free check.


Cheers!!!!

I hope that was sarcasm. The more this unemployment problem compounds the more money Obama will ask of congress..And where do you think that will come from? Foreign investment? Nope that is going to go away. And the Fed will just print it in such large volumes that it will only throw gas on the fire and burn the house down.

I hope that was sarcasm. The more this unemployment problem compounds the more money Obama will ask of congress..And where do you think that will come from? Foreign investment? Nope that is going to go away. And the Fed will just print it in such large volumes that it will only throw gas on the fire and burn the house down



en.wikipedia.org...(economics)#Deflationary_spiral

Deflation is an enemy ONLY to the big wigs and the Fed. You can keep spamming thread after thread with that wiki article it won't change anything. Obama's plan to cut taxes while massively increasing inflation through government spending will be the death blow. Try doing more research, the rest of us have and the smart money is on Inflationary spiral.

But I'm sure you will come up with some Keynesian BS reason for us to look the other way while our saving are being destroyed by massive government spending.

Good luck trying to convince any one of that.

Edit to add:

What we are seeing now is not a deflationary spiral. It is a market correction of artificial demand bubbles created by the fed to boost share prices. All this is doing is compounding the problem. You have to look beyond a drop in commodities to understand what is happening. You have to take the Feds actions into account and realize where we stand in terms of debt, and how that debt is financed to see where the inflation is coming from. Posting wiki articles is not research it's regurgitation.

[edit on 16-1-2009 by projectvxn]

I guess the mentality of our morons in Washington is that as long as the dollar worth something to Americans everything is ok.

I don't think that the Government should just give out money to help the unemployment and economic problem. But what they can do is give us vouchers for use in making a number of house payment while laid off. Or car payments. Something to that extent. To just arbitrarily give out money who make inflation sky rocket. a loaf of bread would be 15 bucks over night and people would have no need of work and cause even more economic chaos. The 850 billion needs to be wisely spent on the American People, not the corporation because once the people are secure, business will follow through the people.

reply to post by Pinktip


It has been predicted some things will be Deflationary, and some
things will be Inflationary.

I think food will go up in price.

I think luxury items and such will crash in price if the depression
gets going full tilt.

Depression is now coming into view

Ppl will just be trying to get by on the basics after awhile if the economies
keep falling apart for various reasons.

I just read about Circuit City, a major electronics chain in the USA, cutting 30,000 jobs.

I see a shady future for this nation.

[edit on 16/1/2009 by n0b0DY]

The government shouldn't be subsidizing anything. Everything the government can "Give" has to be taken from us first. This current stimulus is going to do nothing more than destroy the dollar. Even if they shrank it down to just subsidizing consumer credit, it would still only add to the death of the dollar that will come with or without this stimulus. We could head this and maybe cut it a little shorter without the stimulus and get away with 1970s inflation, instead we're going to see Zimbabwe inflation.

It will likely be all things. I'm not looking at those little things at the micro level. I'm looking at the whole monetary policy. Food and fuel will certainly be hiked to ungodly levels. And if interest rates don't rise and we keep all this cheap money around we won't have enough buying power to buy a grain of rice on the world market.

Uh, any tax cuts "given" by the government should NOT be counted in this concept of them wildly printing new money. Thinking that tax cuts are the same as the government spending money or giving it back to the people is bullcrap and plays into their hands. They want us pleebs to think the money is first Uncle Sam's, then ours when it is really the exact opposite.

I have a question . please let me know if i am too far out in center field. If the u.s. gov't gave every "tax payer " a large sum of money , do you think it would have a negative impact such as early retirement ? lotta boomers out here. and younger people not working at all ? or going to work later ? am i making any sense here ?

Originally posted by prd1
I have a question . please let me know if i am too far out in center field. If the u.s. gov't gave every "tax payer " a large sum of money , do you think it would have a negative impact such as early retirement ? lotta boomers out here. and younger people not working at all ? or going to work later ? am i making any sense here ?

All that will do is decrease the value of the dollar. If you give everyone in America one dollar the price of the dollar is minus one dollar. If you give everyone in America one million dollars, the base price is increased to one million dollars and your buying power decreases by that much.

reply to post by prd1

Here are the prices of food from the 1940's.

It is pretty clear to see that things have gone up a lot on some items.

All items have gone up some though.

Prices from the 1940's

The reason I post this is so ppl can make a comparison between
then and now and realize its about to get worse.

Add these guys and, incidentally, myself to the list of financial casualties:
Autodesk cuts 10% of staff

Hoping to save $130 million a year, Autodesk Inc. will lay off 750 people and merge some of its offices around the world. The San Rafael design software business said the cuts represent about 10 percent of its employees.

I know it isn't a lot of people comparatively, but that was my job, dude.

On "Hyperinflation"

Let's put this to rest right here and now.

"Hyperinflation", or even "Serious Inflation" (similar to what we had in the 1970s) is impossible without a means to transmit the rise in prices into wages.

In today's United States that simply cannot happen for two reasons:

* The union representation of workers has been eviscerated due to their own idiocy over the previous thirty years. In effect, they have no power to impact economic or labor policy - no matter what Gettlefinger thinks.
* Outsourcing of work to China, India, Mexico and other nations makes wage demands impossible for American workers to enforce. Such demands simply result in the loss of the job to overseas workers.

As a consequence a hyper-inflationary or even seriously-inflationary spiral is impossible to sustain.

Think about your associates, people who you know in the middle class.

Now consider that a 10% inflation rate (moderately bad "serious inflation" ala 1970s) goes on for four years.

This raises the cost of living for everyone by 46%.

How many people who you know are saving 46% of their income? How many will survive a 46% increase in their cost of living?

Such an outcome will result in half or more of America becoming immediately homeless, hungry, and as a consequence out of work. It will as a consequence crash GDP by 50% or more immediately which in turn will crash income tax receipts by a like amount at both state and federal levels.

This will in turn crash prices, but at that point it's too late as now the price crash in turn destroys what remains of the business community and further crashes tax receipts, while at the same time foreign bond investors throw up their hands and say "screw you!", cutting off all foreign capital inflows to the government.

Down that road lies immediate insurrection - that is, the violent overthrow of the government. You are delusional if you think the military could stop such a thing - 150 million Americans, maybe even 200 million of the 300 million in our population? Not a prayer in hell, even if all the Americans had was pitchforks, torches and a gallon of gasoline, and they don't - they have firearms, and lots of them. Even the Chinese, who are (by demonstrated act) willing to roll tanks over their own people would have no chance against 100 million of their citizens if hunger ever trumps fear.

This didn't happen in the 1970s because we had vastly more union work representation and they were able to force wages to keep pace for the average working man. While the pinch was bad (I grew up in it and remember it vividly) society never degenerated because the self-reinforcing crash of production, jobs and tax income never happened, and as a consequence the sort of mass-unemployment, disenfranchisement and loss of essential human needs did not come about.

Today the average working man works for WalMart or some other non-union shop and has no wage pricing power; ergo, there is absolutely no way to prevent the implosion from initiating.

The government must not engage in any sort of policy that could lead to this outcome. Absolute protection at the top levels of government must be put in place to prevent it, because if this occurs then everything - absolutely everything - that we know and love about America disappears.

This is where the Peter Schiffs and McHughs are wrong in their hyperinflation thesis and their "defensive" measures to try to do something about it (or worse, McHugh's belief that not only is this inevitable but that the government should intentionally cause it through something like a "money drop" to households.)

They are wrong because if this outcome occurs there will be no United States of America, your gold will be confiscated and/or rendered worthless by executive fiat, and at approximately the same time an angry marauding mob consisting of half the population of the country will literally loot and burn everything to the ground.

Vengence inevitably follows when justice is denied for a long enough or in an egregious enough fashion. We have seen this with Rodney King and now with the apparent BART assasination of a suspect in Oakland, and that was one man who was abused at the hands of government. Make the abuse half the population and there is a zero chance that civil and political order is maintained.

Pray that our nation's leaders aren't stupid enough to set in motion such a course of action either by accident or under the foolish belief that they can "keep the outcome under control".

Time is running out to demand and obtain justice folks. America's clock is literally ticking towards zero.

And before you argue Weimar Republic...

There was big inflation during WWI, with wages and prices rising across the board due to a shortage of manpower for factories and a demand for armaments This was true across Europe.

Price and wage deflation hit immediately after the war in Britain.

But for Germany: "where employers and workers are strongly organized, wages are generally fixed by local or national collective agreements...Wage rates, being based on the cost of living which is constantly changing, are generally valid for short periods only. During 1921 there was a continual rise in the cost of living with a corresponding increase of wage rates accompanied by a steady depreciation of the Mark."

Independent of the Weimar debt payments, this shows there was an underlying mechanism for huge inflation in Germany: organized labor's wages were tied to the officially noticed cost of living. This is the same situation we had in the US in the 1970's.

It was certainly in the best interests of Germany to depreciate the Mark in order to make war reparations more manageable, but this was tied directly back into wage inflation by the nature of labor organization in Germany.

We have no such mechanism in modern America.

Also, for an idea of how bad the job losses REALLY are, visit Layoff Daily

reply to post by 4N6310


Man that sucks

The greedy men at the top dont care about us lil peeps.



But I have to agree with the inflation thing...

totaly scary stuff.. zimbabwe is prime example

reply to post by marg6043


The people in Washington are not morons. They are actually very smart. Even Bush is smart despite being linguistically-challenged. It's the masses who are very stupid.