financial crisis

[Aggie]

Originally Posted by Shabbaman

I'd say it's a mental strain to live from reorganisation to reorganisation. Be careful it doesn't break you.

The company I work for is still making boatloads of profit. Thank god (or the rather the EU, as I'm atheist) for strict environmental laws! But otherwise I'm still confident I'm not the first one they'd kick out.

My company (HP/EDS) makes a shitload of profit but still they want us to voluntarily cut our wages with 5 to 10% and they're also firing people...

[Shabbaman]

Hm, well, yeah... this is not a big company, and usually they're simply hiring everyone that applies for a job. Bigger companies that strive for an "optimal business model" might see everything as an excuse to fire people?

[romeothemonk]

We just had an interesting development at my main job. The particular company that I work for violated a debt covenant, and had to apply for more funding from our main parent company.
http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/...1004-09-000021

Anyway, the financial crisis is still building for many companies. Me personally, the crisis is abating somewhat as the Walmart job is still building a safety cushion for me.

I can give more details later, but the main wounding is done, and now it is just a slow bleed out and wound covering.

[ProPain]

I;m still wondering how long this thing will last though. We frequently get people telling us things are looking better because (US) consumer confidence is rising, or the bank stress tests went fairly well or some other indicator that the experts use to get us into the spending consumer mode.

And then we got our unemployment & economic 'growth' figures for the 1st quarter of 2009 in the Netherlands and they were both worse than expected.

For now I'm not really affected personally nor professionaly but if this is gonna last a few years you just don't know what will hit us all.

[Shabbaman]

Well...

I'm no economist, but I do know two things:

1. those figures are from the previous quarter, so it doesn't say much about what's happening now
2. economic growth is a measurement based on the amount of money that's shuffled around. Less banks creating money out of nowhere means less economic growth, but this doesn't mean a thing about what the economy is worth. GNP is just a crappy indicator.

[Matrix]

True. Much of the measured economic growth of last years was fake as it was sort of created by the banks. A sort of a creative accountancy plus...

But the economy really is affected for sure. My dad's an architect and fears for his job. The housing construction market has totally collapsed. And my wife, a translator, also gets much less assignments. The majority of them are manuals and patents.

[Shabbaman]

Originally Posted by Matrix

But the economy really is affected for sure.

Oh, definately. Minor shifts in consumption can have a dramatic effect on the economy. But what kills construction companies is the lack of loans. This is happening to our customers as well. It's tough if you're in a business where you have to rely on large sums of external money. But people still want those new houses: so is it an economical crisis or a financial crisis? I guess the difference doesn't really matter, but with two banks owned by the state I'd say it's easier to fix the latter.