Tech firms, crypto companies, Goldman Sachs announce major layoffs
Following announcements last week by Salesforce, Vimeo and Amazon that they would be laying off thousands of workers, dozens of other companies around the world have followed suit and announced significant job cuts.
The announced layoffs are not restricted to any single industry. However, newer tech and cryptocurrency companies, along with major banks such as Goldman Sachs, confirmed cuts to their global workforces this week. The job losses will mainly impact white collar workers, including mid-level managers, but even senior management positions are on the chopping block.
Tech industry layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi is reporting that so far this year 82 tech companies have laid off 23,550 workers around the world. A separate tracker, trueup.io, has reported 29,923 layoffs at 120 tech companies so far this year.
The tech industry already experienced record-setting layoffs last year. According to figures compiled by trueup.io, 237,874 people lost their jobs in the tech sector in 2022, while Layoffs.fyi reported that 1,023 tech companies laid off a total of 154,256 workers last year.
Either figure represents at least a doubling of the highest number of tech layoffs experienced by workers during the Great Recession, according to data by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based global outplacement & career transitioning firm. In 2008 and 2009, the firm estimated that 65,000 tech workers around the world lose their jobs each year.
On Friday, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek announced in a blog post that the company was reducing its “global workforce by approximately 20 percent.” The Singapore-based company, founded by Marszalek in 2016, employs 2,450 people according to PitchBook, meaning some 490 employees are being laid off.
Brian Armstrong, the billionaire CEO of US-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, announced this past Tuesday that the company would be cutting a fifth of its global workforce, or roughly 950 jobs. This is the second major round of layoffs at the company in the last year.
Last June, 1,100 workers were laid off at the company. In his post Tuesday, Armstrong threatened more layoffs, writing, “We may not have seen the last of it.”
Referring to the collapse of FTX and the nearly $1.4 trillion lost in the crypto market in 2022, Armstrong said, “[T]here will be increased scrutiny on various companies in the space to make sure that they’re following the rules.”
“The FTX collapse and the resulting contagion has created a black eye for the industry,” Armstrong added, predicting that there were still more “shoes to drop.”
The ending of the cheap money policies that fueled the growth of the cryptocurrency markets has seen a collapse in the stock prices of the remaining major cryptocurrency companies. CNBC reported this week that shares of Bitcoin fell 58 percent last year, while Coinbase shares have dropped 83 percent.
Outside of crypto, layoffs were announced Wednesday by the co-CEOs of Flexport, Ryan Petersen and Dave Clark. In their memo, Petersen and Clark revealed that the supply chain software company would be laying off 20 percent of its global workforce, affecting some 640 workers.
Scale AI, an artificial intelligence start-up founded in 2016 and valued at $7.3 billion in 2021, announced in a blog post Monday that it would also be laying off 20 percent of its workforce.
Boosted by over $600 million from institutional investors such as Tiger Global, Dragoneer and Index Ventures, along with contracts with the US Department of Defense, Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang, 25, has been crowned the “world’s youngest self-made billionaire” by Forbes.
These, and the countless thousands more layoffs to come, are the result of deliberate class polices enacted by central banks around the world, led by the US Federal Reserve. The raising of interest rates is aimed at increasing the ranks of the unemployed in order to blunt growing demands of workers for increased wages to combat once-in-a-generation and far from transitory inflation.
The US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine is exacerbating supply-chain woes. This, compounded by corporate price-gouging and profiteering, drove inflation in 2022 to the highest levels in decades, according to consumer price index data released by the US Labor Department.
While the department reported that the inflation rate for December 2022 was 6.5 percent, down from the 9.1 percent peak in June 2022, staple items such as eggs, butter and margarine, utilities, electricity and white bread remained in the double-digits.
The Labor Department reported that as of December 2022, year-to-year prices for eggs increased by nearly 60 percent. Fuel oil was up 41.5 percent; white bread increased by 17.7 percent. Health insurance increased by 7.9 percent, slightly less than the 8.3 percent year-to-year increase in rent prices. Overall, food at home increased by 11.8 percent from December 2021 to December 2022.
As workers around the world struggle to afford basic necessities, companies are making it clear that more layoffs are on the way. According to a report by The Information, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is preparing to lay off as much as 6 percent of its global workforce, translating to up to 11,000 job losses.
While an official number has yet to be publicly announced, in an interview with insiderradio.com, a spokesperson for major market research company Nielsen confirmed that it will be reducing the firm’s “total headcount” to “be roughly in line with where it was a year ago,” resulting in hundreds of job losses.
In the UK, British telecom giant Vodoafone, which employs about 104,000 workers globally, including some 9,400 in the UK, announced that it will be shedding “hundreds” of jobs, centered at its headquarters in London.
Banking giant Goldman Sachs announced earlier this week it will be laying off 3,200 bankers around the world. The figure represents the most layoffs at the bank since the 2008 global financial crisis.
IndianExpress reported on Friday that “at least 700 [Goldman Sachs] employees in India” were laid off on Wednesday and Thursday, including “a number of senior employees.”
Before the layoffs, InidianExpress reported that the Wall Street bank had employed nearly 9,000 people at offices in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai. Five fired workers who spoke to the Express told the paper that they were summoned for a “quick meeting” earlier this week and informed that they had been let go.
After being laid off, the workers said they were prevented from going back to their desks and were immediately hustled out of the building.
“Right after I was informed that I was being fired, I was escorted out of the building and asked to go home. I couldn’t even say bye to my friends,” a former software developer at Goldman’s Bengaluru office told the Express.
Former work-from-home employees who were terminated by the bank were notified over Zoom that they no longer had a job.
Major banks have begun to post their final quarter 2022 profits. JPMorgan, reported this week that it “earned” a profit of $11 billion last quarter, a six percent increase from last year.
On a call with investors this week, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said that 2022 was “one of the best years ever for the bank,” with over $7 billion in net income reported in the fourth quarter alone.
While Citigroup and Wells Fargo did not exceed last year’s figures, Citigroup still reported $2.5 billion in profit for the fourth quarter, while Wells Fargo reported nearly $3 billion.
In the face of the global jobs bloodbath, trade unions around the world have done nothing but acquiesce to the demands of capital, while imposing sellout contracts over the objections of rank-and-file workers.
Socialists reject the so-called right of the capitalists to shut down factories, slash wages and carry out mass layoffs for the supposed good of “the economy,” by which the ruling class means the interests of finance capital.
In 2018 and 2020, Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter and his father flew to China aboard Air Force Two in 2013 before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China, which transpired less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post regarding the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that the president was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a ten percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
Sponsored by the New York Federal Reserve, participants in this plan include banking giants like Wells Fargo, Citigroup, HSBC, and Mastercard, just to name a few.
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"In 2016, according to my analysis of the data, more Americans were
reported killed by homicide in Mexico than the combined total of Americans killed by homicide in every other country abroad." MONICA SHOWALTER
"The newly elected president, Andrés López-Obrador, was gleeful during the election when he told his compadres they should all move to America, illegally. His encouragement along with his pro-poverty policies will set the stage for another tsunami of illegal immigration." COLIN FLAHERTY
"They will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion. They have nothing but contempt for us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gangs, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
The immigration debate has been raging for years. Advocates for open borders can be found on both sides of the political aisle and in a wide variety of special interest groups who have come to see the immigration system that delivers an unlimited supply of cheap and exploitable labor, an unlimited supply of foreign tourists, and unlimited supply of foreign students and, for the lawyers, an unlimited supply of clients. MICHAEL CUTLER
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Mexico prefers to export its poor, not uplift them
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0330/p09s02-coop.html
Mexico prefers to export its poor, not uplift them
By George W. Grayson
WILLIAMSBURG, VA. — At the parleys this week with his US and Canadian counterparts in Cancún, Mexican President Vicente Fox will press for more opportunities for his countrymen north of the Rio Grande. Specifically, he will argue for additional visas for Mexicans to enter the United States and Canada, the expansion of guest-worker schemes, and the "regularization" of illegal immigrants who reside throughout the continent. In a recent interview with CNN, the Mexican chief executive excoriated as "undemocratic" the extension of a wall on the US-Mexico border and called for the "orderly, safe, and legal" northbound flow of Mexicans, many of whom come from his home state of Guanajuato.
Mexican legislators share Mr. Fox's goals. Silvia Hernández Enriquez, head of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for North America, recently emphasized that the solution to the "structural phenomenon" of unlawful migration lies not with "walls or militarization" but with "understanding, cooperation, and joint responsibility."
Such rhetoric would be more convincing if Mexican officials were making a good faith effort to uplift the 50 percent of their 106 million people who live in poverty. To his credit, Fox's "Opportunities" initiative has improved slightly the plight of the poorest of the poor. Still, neither he nor Mexico's lawmakers have advanced measures that would spur sustained growth, improve the quality of the workforce, curb unemployment, and obviate the flight of Mexicans abroad.
Indeed, Mexico's leaders have turned hypocrisy from an art form into an exact science as they shirk their obligations to fellow citizens, while decrying efforts by the US senators and representatives to crack down on illegal immigration at the border and the workplace.
What are some examples of this failure of responsibility?
• When oil revenues are excluded, Mexico raises the equivalent of only 9 percent of its gross domestic product in taxes - a figure roughly equivalent to that of Haiti and far below the level of major Latin American nations. Not only is Mexico's collection rate ridiculously low, its fiscal regime is riddled with loopholes and exemptions, giving rise to widespread evasion. Congress has rebuffed efforts to reform the system.
• Insufficient revenues mean that Mexico spends relatively little on two key elements of social mobility: Education commands just 5.3 percent of its GDP and healthcare only 6.10 percent, according to the World Bank's last comparative study.
• A venal, "come-back-tomorrow" bureaucracy explains the 58 days it takes to open a business in Mexico compared with three days in Canada, five days in the US, nine days in Jamaica, and 27 days in Chile. Mexico's private sector estimates that 34 percent of the firms in the country made "extra official" payments to functionaries and legislators in 2004. These bribes totaled $11.2 billion and equaled 12 percent of GDP.
• Transparency International, a nongovernmental organization, placed Mexico in a tie with Ghana, Panama, Peru, and Turkey for 65th among 158 countries surveyed for corruption.
• Economic competition is constrained by the presence of inefficient, overstaffed state oil and electricity monopolies, as well as a small number of private corporations - closely linked to government big shots - that control telecommunications, television, food processing, transportation, construction, and cement. Politicians who talk about, much less propose, trust-busting measures are as rare as a snowfall in the Sonoran Desert.
Geography, self-interests, and humanitarian concerns require North America's neighbors to cooperate on myriad issues, not the least of which is immigration. However, Mexico's power brokers have failed to make the difficult decisions necessary to use their nation's bountiful wealth to benefit the masses. Washington and Ottawa have every right to insist that Mexico's pampered elite act responsibly, rather than expecting US and Canadian taxpayers to shoulder burdens Mexico should assume.
• George W. Grayson, who teaches government at the College of William & Mary, is the author of "Mesías Mexicano," forthcoming, a book about Mexican presidential front-runner Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Mexican President Celebrates ’40 Million’ Mexicans in the U.S.
Mexico’s President Andrés Lopez Obrador says 40 million Mexicans are living in the United States.
“Just imagine: There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States — 40 million [including people] who were born here in Mexico, [or] who are the children of people who were born in Mexico,” President Andrés Lopez Obrador gushed at a January 10 press conference with President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Obrador’s proud Mexican-first advocacy for ethnic Mexicans — including ethnic Mexicans in the United States — is very different from the globalist, investor-first policies pushed by Trudeau and Biden.
At the Tuesday summit, Biden pushed the globalist, pro-migration “Nation of Immigrants” narrative as he described all Americans — including the descendants of Americans — as mere immigrants.
“Look, all of you know all of us in the United States are immigrants,” Biden said. “Mine go all the way back to the Irish famine,” Biden told the press conference.
Biden’s use of “immigrant” demotes the status of American citizens to that of illegal migrants, because the same “immigrant” term is normally used by establishment outlets to promote illegal migrants.
Biden also called for the use of global labor to fill jobs in the U.S. economy, regardless of many sidelined Americans, and regardless of the economic impact on ordinary Americans’ wages and rents:
We cannot wall ourself off from shared problems. We are stronger and better when we work together … At the top of our shared agenda today is keeping North America the most competitive, prosperous, and resilient economic region of the world … [and creating] pathways for immigrants from Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti that were seeking a better life here in the United States of America.
Biden recently announced a plan to allow 360,000 people from four countries to move to the United States each year. That huge population transfer from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela is in addition to the global inflow of illegal migrants, and Congress’s normal inflow of roughly one million legal immigrants.
In contrast, the Mexican president repeatedly boasted about how his government policies are making life better for Mexicans, and are reducing the incentives for Mexicans to migrate to the United States:
The [goverenment] budget is used for development and supporting the poorest sectors of our population, today we not only have jobs, employment, we have seen reductions in violence. We have less migration as well. And we’ve also tempered frustration. And what we can see is this flame — this flame which is alive. I’m talking about the flame of hope.
Obrador’s pro-Mexican policies include his demand that Congress give the huge prize of amnesty to Mexico’s illegal migrants in the United States:
I fully trust President Biden … I’ve asked President Biden to insist before the U.S. Congress to regularize the migration situations of millions of Mexicans who have been in the States working, living in the United States, and contributing to the development of that great nation, which is the United States of America.
As an ethnic Mexican nationalist, Obrador opposes Mexican emigration — but he also supports more ethnic Latino migration into the United States:
We do celebrate the fact that the U.S. administration has … made the decision, rather, to have an orderly migration flow in the case, for instance, of our Venezuelan brothers and sisters … Just as I was telling you that in the case of migration, first there were brothers and sisters from Central America and also from Mexico, but now, in recent times, a lot of migrants from Venezuela, from Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador.
Obrador also applauded Trudeau’s decision to import 25,000 Mexican temporary workers for Canadian jobs, such as helping to house and feed Trudeau’s huge wave of global migrants who have been invited into Canada. “This program is already benefiting 25,000 men and women — 25,000 Mexicans,” said Obrador.
“Prime Minister Trudeau is a great ally of Mexico,” he added.
Obrador downplayed the benefits gained by Mexico when U.S. investors moved many manufacturing jobs to Mexico, as he claimed that his pro-Mexican policies are reducing Mexican emigration:
There are less migrants abandoning Mexico now because there’s public investment; because out of 35 million families, 30 million families of Mexican families are now receiving at least a program — a wellbeing program …All the senior citizens, 65 or over, receive a pension … Eleven million students of low-income families, of poor families are getting grants [and] cholarships …. We are planting over 1 million hectares of fruit and timber trees. And we are giving jobs to over 400,000 peasants that are growing, planting those trees … So, then, all these programs help so that people may be staying in their own communities, in their towns.
The U.S. government has long operated a globalist economic policy of “Extraction Migration.” The policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, disguised under the Cold War-era “Nation of Immigrants” narrative and deliberately ineffective border security.
The extracted workers, renters, and consumers are used to grow Wall Street and to expand the low-wage service sector in the economy.
This colonization-like policy has killed many thousands of unrecognized migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, and reduced native-born Americans’ clout in local and national elections, and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
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