Pink Slips: 100,000 Jobs Wiped Out Amid Oil Price Collapse: “Spreading Like Cancer”
Mac Slavo
March 21st, 2015
SHTFplan.com
Low oil prices are good for America according to President Obama. In fact, he has personally taken credit for the savings you’re experiencing.
In a normal economy lower prices at the pump would certainly help to spur growth in other sectors. The problem, of course, is that the new normal means that oil companies and banks leveraged heavily as prices rose. They assumed, like real estate speculators ahead of the 2008 crash, that the price of oil could only go in one direction. As we’ve seen in recent months, however, oil speculation is exactly that and despite our dependency on black gold the energy industry is not immune from massive price swings.
The consequences will be two-fold and the cracks are already starting to appear.
First, according to a new report from Zero Hedge, over 100,000 jobs have been lost globally as a result of lower oil prices and more are pink slips are coming:
The bloodletting among the oil majors and their vast web of ancillary services has of course extended to the United States – which appears to be taking far more casualties than Saudi Arabia in the battle for marketshare. In January oilfield services giant Baker Hughes said it will lay off 7,000 employees, about 11 percent of its workforce; that number was rivalled only by its competitor, Schlumberger, which let go 9,000 workers. Shell, Apache, Pemex and Halliburton are among major oil companies to issue recent pink slips to the growing army of unemployed oil workers. In the U.S., the worst pain is, not shockingly, expected to be felt in Houston. Assuming a one-third reduction in oil company capital expenditures this year and 5 percent in 2016, the hydrocarbon capital of the world could lose 75,000 jobs, in a city that has added 100,000 new positions every year since 2011, said a professor at the University of Houston.
The oil jobs nightmare is in fact spreading like a cancer. According to Swift Worldwide Resources, “the number of energy jobs cut globally has climbed well above 100,000 as once-bustling oil hubs in Scotland, Australia and Brazil, among other countries, empty out,”Bloomberg reported recently.
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