Announced U.S. Job Cuts Rise 212% From Year Ago, Challenger Says!
- The US economy has not gotten out of Great Depression 2.0. It is only Wall Street and the banksters who are raking in the dough! U6 unemployment is in the region of 22% (www.shadowstats.com). The number of people on food stamps is still rising. The reality is: Ben Shalom Bernanke will QE to infinity! It is a matter of when!
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Announced U.S. Job Cuts Rise 212% From Year Ago, Challenger Says
By Alex Kowalski, http://www.businessweek.com/
Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) — U.S. employers announced the most job cuts in more than two years in September, led by planned reductions at Bank of America Corp. and in the military.
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Announced firings jumped 212 percent, the largest increase since January 2009, to 115,730 last month from 37,151 in September 2010, according to Chicago-based Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. Cuts in government employment, led by the Army’s five-year troop reduction plan, and at Bank of America accounted for almost 70 percent of the announcements.
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While the bulk of firings are not “directly related” to economic weakness, they “could definitely be a sign of more cuts to come,” John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement. “Bank of America is not the only bank still struggling in the wake of the housing collapse, and the military cutbacks are probably just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to federal spending cuts.”
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More reductions will add to the pool of job seekers competing for work as policy makers, including President Barack Obama and Federal Reserve officials, strive to spur the labor market. Payrolls probably didn’t rise fast enough last month to lower the jobless rate, according to a Bloomberg News survey of economists before the Labor Department’s monthly jobs figures in two days.
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Compared with August, job-cut announcements climbed 126 percent, the Challenger report showed. Because the figures aren’t adjusted for seasonal effects, economists prefer to focus on year-over-year changes rather than monthly numbers.
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Government agencies announced 54,182 reductions in September. Of those, 50,000 resulted from the troop reductions announced by the Army, Challenger said.
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