Taste The Pain

My wife has been predicting an economic collapse for ten years now, just on general principles, and she's sort of happy her predictions are finally coming true. Her favorite blog (I am apparently not even in the top 10) has recently become The Layoff List. Run by a fellow in New York State, its purpose is to

...highlight the ever deteriorating job picture and to list smaller layoff announcements that don’t get the attention of main stream media. There is a great deal of scattered job loss information, but I want to try and gather as much information as I can and present it in a manner that is concise, informative and somewhat easy to read.

The site traffics in both news and rumors, and these latter tend more often than not to be born out. For example, LL called Microsoft's last round of layoffs several weeks before they were confirmed in the MSM. Quite a bit of Canadian content as well.

Reminds me a bit of that great old website, F***ked Company, that narrated the collapse of the tech bubble in the late 1990s.

So give it a visit, because things are far, far worse then you think.

Patience, Grasshopper!

...is what I've been telling Libloggers for the past month or two now (like the old guy from Kung Fu). The economy is going South, and Tory prospects will travel with it. Wait, I've been saying, for the crap numbers to arrive! Well, they started arriving today:

OTTAWA–Canada’s red hot labour market caught a chill from U.S. recessionary winds in March as the spreading economic gloom sliced 47,000 full-time jobs from the payrolls in manufacturing-heavy Ontario and Quebec.

You used to hear it argued that elections were nothing more than referendums on the state of the business cycle. By that logic, the next step is to make the Tories own this slowdown/downturn/recession/economic apocalypse. They know it too! What d'you think is behind all the McGuinty bashing lately? They're trying to hand him the hot potato!

The State Of The Markets, The State Of The Nation

Looks like another bad day overseas, and CTV economists are expecting a 500 hundred point plunge at opening on the DOW. A co-worker of mine made a call yesterday and found out that $4,000 of his retirement fund had just gone poof.

Recessions suck, and I expect that despite the solid fundamentals underlying the Canadian economy, we are headed into one that will be particularly bad. In 1990, if I remember correctly, there wasn't nearly the kind of stock market apocalypse that we've seen in the last couple of days.

And I remember last time around, when I was with a different employer, the company called a taxi for each of the people they were laying off. Of course they were all from one department and took smoke break together, so they were outside when the cars showed up. It was the cabbies told that first told them they'd been sacked.

As for the political effects, I agree with CG:

I think the"right thing for Canada" would be to wait until things get bad enough that people are willing to toss Harper over the economy and then bring 'em down.

Patience, people, patience.