Casualty line going longer ...

Casualty line going longer ...

First, it was Lehman Brothers, but the list kept getting longer.

Others followed suit after. Some, I don't know if I can call it more fortunate, didn't file for Chapter 11, only cut jobs.

I have decided to make a list of companies which have cut jobs to prevent them going the same way as Lehman Brothers did. So here goes,

1. Honda to eliminate its temporary and part-time workforce of 3,100
   
2. Motorola slashes 4,000 jobs
3. Even Google lays off 100 full-time recruiters
4. Pfizer prepares to cut up 800 researcher jobs
   
5. Neiman Marcus losses 400 jobs
6. Walgreen lets go of 1,000 management jobs
7. Saks cuts 1,100 corporate support and store jobs
   
8. Boeing cuts 4,500 jobs
9. Logitech cuts 15% of its workforce
10. Cigna cuts 1,000 jobs
11. Motorola reduces staff level by 4,000
12. Hertz cuts more than 4,000 jobs
    
13. Citibank cut 40,000 jobs
14. Washington Mutual eliminate 1,600 jobs
    
15. Rolls Royce lay off 2,ooo people worldwide
    
16. Bank of America reduces workforce by up to 35,000 until early 2009
    
17. DHL cut 9,500 jobs
18. Credit Suisse sheds over 5,000 jobs
    
19. State Street Corp cuts 1,800 positions
20. AT&T cuts 12,000 jobs

... and the list goes on.

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house of cards tumbling down

Wow! What a world we live in. Exciting and at the same time, scary like hell. One-by-one, financial institutions we thought are as everlasting as the Rock of Gibraltar or whatever rock we want to use for 'exotic' comparison, each of them are tumbling down like a house of cards so beautiful yet so vulnerable the higher and bigger it becomes.

Lehman Brothers is one of the biggest financial institutions which raised the white flag first. Clearly, we are witnessing the true essence of capitalism --- survival of the fittest. As one looks at the video below, one couldn't help ask 'what in the world is going on?'


As more stable (one knows what that really means nowadays) banks and other financial institutions absorb the weaker sex, oops, I mean the weaker ones; we are looking at a new dimension of capitalism. Are the basic tenets of capitalism slowly collapsing? Governments and their agencies (think Federal Reserve) are NOT suppose to bail out commercial institutions. Laissez-faire, right? We will know how far governments will go to bail out their respective financial systems to stem a prolonged recession. Maybe a closer observation on what is happening in Iceland will give us an idea. (I will talk about Iceland as a nation on the brink of bancrupcty in my next post).

A lot will think that what is happening is a nightmare straight from the Grimm's Brothers' imagination. I do beg to disagree. What is happening is so valuable no one, nobody can afford NOT to pay attention. The lessons we learn today will determine the directions of capitalism in the future. Perhaps, what is going on right now will revive debates on what is the best method to manage wealth. Marx vs. laissez-faire or whatever is left of it.