Corporate Layoffs: The Storm Has Passed
Scott Grannis at the always excellent Calafia Beach Pundit blog produced the graph above on Corporate Layoffs, and comments:
I've been showing this chart since early this year, saying that it was a good indicator of improvement in the economy. Corporate layoff announcements (which are presumably a fairly accurate gauge of distress in the large corporate sector of the economy) are now down to levels that in the past have been consistent with healthy economic growth. The storm has clearly passed.
MP: What's interesting is to compare Scott's graph above to the graph below of the "Search Volume Index" for the term "layoffs" using Google Trends, showing the same surge towards the end of 2008 followed by a huge spike around the first of the year, and then a sharp decline over the year, falling to levels in recent months that are about the same as in 2007. (Note: Google Trends only goes back to 2004 so it's not possible to match the same time periods in both graphs.)
4 Comments:
The term "unemployment compensation" is following the trendline for layoffs at Google Trends.
It is interesting that "spending" is following similiar trendlines of the past. It is troubling that "Investing" has a continous declining trend at Google Trends since 2004.HMMMMMM
Well now gettingrational you brought up a good point...
Less investing means fewer jobs and less disposable income to be spread around to keep other folks employed...
From Corporate Dealmaker: Corporate layoffs: J&J, Nokia JV and much more
The news in the article is NOT good but the last line ends on a optimistic note: 'Despite all of this, Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. announced on Wednesday that planned layoffs at U.S. firms fell for a third straight month in October to a 19-month low'...
Die recession, die, die, die!
Obama is making a bad idea even worse in Afghanie, but he does seem to have a sensible economic team. They inherited a train wreck, and now have got the train back on the tracks. Lawrence Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke are serious about their craft, and show up for work. Bernanke in particualr is a student of the Great Depression, and aware (along with Milont Friedman) of the prisl of constriucting the money supply in a deepening recession.
Corporate taxes are still too high, we subsidize rural economis to the tune of hundreds of billions a year, and we carry the military parasite on our backs. But, the economy will chug ahead now. The private sector is resilient, and lots of talented hard working people out there.
There are some commercial real estate problems ahead. In an entirely free market, institutional buyers and lenders way overpaid or overlent for office buildings, now worth 50 cents on the dollar. I don't know why institutional investors have these repeated hard-ons for office trophies. Or why lenders lend.
Why did institutional lenders give Sam Zell $8 billion to buy Tribune? That deal had bust written all over it?
Trading Economics on its front page has a comparison of unemployment rates for 50 countries...
Eight countries have higer unemployment rates than the US...
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