Well looks like Home Depot is cutting 7000 jobs and Caterpillar is cutting 20000 jobs with only a profit of $661 million dollars this fourth quarter instead of $975 million, this crap is getting ridiculous and its just going to get alot worse.
I mentioned in the other thread my friend that lives upstairs worked for Home Depot Expo told me last night they're all out of a job now. All Expos closed. Scary times!!
I couldn't believe the report on the radio that CAT will lay-off 20,000 employees. Sprint will cut around 5,000 jobs. Where are all of these people going to work? There are people that once were earning $60,000+ a year applying for fast food restaurant jobs that start off at minumum wage. Crazy. The Obama administration already warned the nation that even with the stimulous package and additional bailout money dispersed the economy will still get worse before it gets better.:?:
So let me get this straight home depot laying off workers and they still made a profit of 661 million in this 4th Qtr. That sucks if so because clearly they still made a fat profit
I know a guy that works for an aerospace company and has a choice between being laid off or cutting his wage $10 and hour. He was making $32/hr and is now making $22/hr. I guess that's better than making $0!
The news about CAT is not surprising. As construction and infrastrucure projects are put on hold, there aren't a lot of people buying new tractors/earth movers. Its a sign of the times; everybody's saying "do I really need to buy this?". Where will all the recently unemployed work? How about all those jobs "no one else will do" being done by illegals? Now's the perfect time to enforce pre-existing immigration laws and end benefits to those in USA illegally. How about the government giving incentives to domestic manufacturers (instead of throwing away money on sleazy financial institutions) and raising the cost of outsourcing to foreign countries, so that we begin to manufacture more goods here, instead of importing them from China? This will create jobs and stimulate the economy. The "stimulus package" is a joke. The government has already dispersed -what?- 300 billion dollars (with absolutely no conditions) to bankers/"investors" and things are still getting worse. They aren't stimulating you or I at all, because all they want from us is our votes and our tax money.
We need a war now, more than ever. Come on Obama, France or Canada are just there on table to be taken over.
Its a sign of the times; everybody's saying "do I really need to buy this?". I don't think anyone on STR is familiar with this phrase.
thank you. and we can start by putting up a fence along our northern border--that'll put some folks to work. i'm tired of those damn canucks, and terrorists, just walking into our country.
I agree with everything you said. But unfortunately the Democrats want to give all the illegal immigrants citizenship, but deport them.
Every time you think an industry/job is safe you hear news that its not. It makes you take notice no matter what industry you're in. I heard on NPR that the jobless rate in LA county is 9.9 percent or something close to that. OC had a realtively low rate though. I'm employed right now and we're in the process of taking actions to cut our monthly out put so that amongst other things if the axe falls we're somewhat insulated. Crazy times! Good luck to everyone.
Where to start? Illegal immigrants find jobs here for two reasons: 1-People in places like Laguna Beach don't want to pay things like minimum wage, payroll taxes, and worker's comp for the guy cutting their lawn or the nanny watching their kids. So they don't. 2-Family is here, and the cost and hassle of immigration means that it's simply the rational choice to walk over. Anyways, illegal immigrants didn't cause the financial crisis, so I have to wonder why you'd want to ship them all out tout suite...shouldn't we have bigger problems on our minds? Manufacturing is gone. It's not coming back. We've heard for years how America is a knowledge economy, and that we were going to dream up how it gets done, and then send it overseas to actually get done. Part of this seemed to me to be implicitly racist, like we think that for some reason people in Taiwan and China can do the grunt work but they aren't smart enough to actually figure it out on their own. Guess what, people in India and China can learn to do stuff like taxes and read x-ray films as well. Oops! At the same time, Americans don't like paying taxes, so we ended up with a crappy makeshift education system that results in journalism majors coming out of college being damn near functionally illiterate. Then, since we don't like paying taxes for shiftless poor people, we also don't have the same degree of automatic stabilizers that other first world countries have. Unemployment insurance, and health insurance, for example. I agree with you that the stimulus package was dispersed without enough oversight (It was easier for a bank to apply for TARP money than it is for a poor person to apply for welfare) but the fact is that letting the financial sector fail would have brought down everything else with it (and it still might, although some credit indicators are getting better.) Long story short, we're screwed, and it's not the Mexicans who did it...
draheim- make it a history lesson. study the patterns of immigration for the last 100 years. if our gov't didn't want "illegals" here, they'd be gone. when reagan granted amnesty in the 80's it told people: "come here, work hard, stay out of trouble, and you'll be rewarded with citizenship." before the 60's there wasn't hardly a limit on immigration (it's what made our country). cheap labor is hard to come by and letting them become citizens now isn't cost effective. but not giving them rights just makes them economic slaves. end o' rant.
Cat has been laying off heavily for the last year and a half or so, start with the earth moving equipment side first. They are going to layoff alot more because as of 2010 cat power systems will no longer be available in over the road/ on highway Trucks. Due to the new tier emissions law Cat cant and does not want to try anymore to clean up their engines. So they just said they are gonna stick to offhighway equipment. cummins engine past the 2010 emissons with flying colors, but they are starting to take hits as well.
Agreed, to blame Mexican illegal immigrants for our own problems is plain ol' racist. Shipping millions of people out of the country is not the answer (fyi. there are more illegal immigrants in the US now than there were Jews and other immigrants in Germany prior to WWII - and we know what happened in Germany when they tried to solve their immigrant problem - a country cannot just ship out 12-13,000,000 people without creating a humanitarian nightmare). The problem that got us to where we are is the economy's over reliance on credit as the "grease" that fuels the economy. Most of the growth in the US over that last couple of decades has relied on ever increasing credit to fund growth. We have come to the point when we are, as an economy, spending more that we are worth. We all know what happens to individuals when they get into too much debt and can't keep up with it. Now the entire economy is in the same situation. Our economy is primarily driven by consumer spending (which is funded not based on real assets but by credit). We need to change that way of life and migrate to a more "real economy" model. Spend only what you really have and don;t expect consumer credit to help. What we need to do is lessen personal as well as the overall economy's overreliance on credit. If you want to buy a car save up $20-$30,000 and then go buy it; don't go to a dealership expecting a car loan. Its interesting that some of the world's economies in developing countries in Eastern Europe, Lat Am and Africa, that do not have developed credit markets and such instruments as car loans and complex mortgages, are actually not in as deep of an economic problem as we are.
The big difference is that this is a worldwide recession. Companies are seeing retraction in all markets. Cat has alot of overseas sales that usually diminish the effect of domestic downturns. The negative feedback has just begun...it's getting scary. Full on death spiral as the unemployed don't find work for months and housing takes another leg down.
