Saturday, July 4, 2009
Phase II of the Great Unwinding
The unemployment timebomb is quietly ticking
The message has not reached Wall Street or the City. If bankers know what is good for them, they will take a teacher's salary for a few years until the storm passes. If they proceed with the bonuses now on the table, even as taxpayers pay for the errors of their caste, they must expect a ferocious backlash.
Posted by devo @ 10:59 PM (1655 views)
6 thoughts on “Phase II of the Great Unwinding”
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devo says:
I’m going to Millets tomorrow to get one of those paramilitary-style balaclavas.
Are they open on a Sunday?
devo says:
In this article by AEP there seems to be a tacit acceptance that QE isn’t working.
I would bet that Brown is being advised the same.
What will be his next move? After all, he is on the record as saying he doesn’t approve of ‘do-nothing’ politics.
enuii says:
Chillingly prophetic article, the comments are interesting already and do reflect the similar tones of conversations I have had with my peers in the engineering sector. Although many are over 40 the common theme is the stagnant and falling incomes, erosion of savings and poor pension returns quietly ticking away in the background as many patiently wait for things to get better whilst remembering labours 1997 anthem. Lower skilled engineers in the building services sector that was bouyed up by PFI, glitzy urban regeneration and mega shopping centres have now hit an employment brick wall and stories are coming in of around 100,000 overseas workers in gulf states like Dubai getting one way tickets back home once the holidays over there arrive and their contracts expire or are terminated.
Sadly if stories like this are in the mainstream press phase II is happening already disguised by the fact that many of those affected still have savings to live off, shares to sell, old endowments to cash in and perhaps private pensions that they can stop or reduce payments to.
As Ambrose writes at the bottom of his article ‘it may be time to put away our texts of Keynes, Friedman, and Fisher, so useful for Phase 1, and start studying what happened to society when global unemployment went haywire in 1932.’
devo says:
@3. enuii “phase II is happening already disguised by the fact that many of those affected still have savings to live off, shares to sell, old endowments to cash in and perhaps private pensions that they can stop or reduce payments to.”
Not forgetting redundancy payouts.
mrmickey says:
I read somewhere that using the unemployment measure used in the 1930’s the USA is already at 25%. Most of the job losses so far in the UK have come from the private sector, once the government are forced to cut public spending expect job losses to ballon in the public sector as well.
mrmickey says:
I read somewhere that using the unemployment measure used in the 1930’s the USA is already at 25%. Most of the job losses so far in the UK have come from the private sector, once the government are forced to cut public spending expect job losses to ballon in the public sector as well.