If This Plays Out, Friday Will Get Ugly
by Wolf Richter
WolfStreet.com
March 30, 2016
A “Warning about March Nonfarm Payrolls”
It has been a daily drum beat. Today “people with knowledge of the matter” told Bloomberg that BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, would whittle down its workforce of 13,000 by about 3%, or 400 jobs, the largest round of layoffs at the firm ever.
Yesterday, The Seattle Times reported that Boeing will trim off 4,000 jobs by June. It could get much worse. According to documents the paper had obtained, at least one unit is targeting cuts of 10% overall: “And people with knowledge of what’s planned say that’s roughly the percentage of jobs expected to be cut statewide. That would translate to as many as 8,000 jobs being eliminated.”
Layoffs in the tech sector, including startups, have graced the news recently. Layoffs in oil and gas have been going on since 2014. Other sectors have been trimming here and there. Corporate sales are down. Earnings are down even more. And the pressure is on to do something about it. Hence the efforts to cut expenses.
But it’s not happening in huge numbers. It’s a steady trickle. And so far, it has not shown up in the weekly unemployment claims reported by the Department of Labor, which remain low.
There appear to be still enough job offers out there – except in oil and gas, where the entire industry is laying off – so that many of these laid-off workers can be absorbed by other companies, and they might already have a new job lined up by the time they leave their current employer. So they would not file a claim for unemployment insurance and would thus stay out of the unemployment claims data reported every Thursday.
The Rest…HERE
