An Absolutely Enormous Economic Shift Of Historic Proportions Is Now Taking Place Right In Front Of Our Eyes
Can you feel it too? Over the past few weeks, I have heard from so many readers that are deeply troubled about economic conditions where they live. In some cases, sales are way down. In other cases, it seems almost impossible to find a decent job. It is almost as if a tremendous chill descended upon the U.S. economy as the second quarter of 2024 began. Yes, economic conditions have certainly not been good for a few years, but it appears that an absolutely enormous economic shift of historic proportions is now taking place right in front of our eyes. Other than the early stages of the pandemic, we haven’t seen anything like this since 2008 and 2009.
Let me give you an example that will illustrate what I am talking about. A reader that lives near Seattle recently wrote me about the horrible downturn that she is witnessing in the tech industry, and she said that I could share this information with all of you…
I live in the tech corridor outside of Seattle and practically no one can find a job in tech. Apparently the costs of AI processors and servers are so expensive that large tech companies are laying off workers to accommodate for the increased infrastructure costs. I would estimate that 50 percent of the people I know in tech are unemployed including myself and my spouse. In addition they are laying off both FTEs and contractors and not backfilling the positions. The problem is exacerbated if you’re over 40 because they don’t want to compensate for experience. In fact experience seems to be working against people. Not to mention AI taking over roles like technical writing and marketing communications. It’s getting really bad out there and the large companies play along with the media. I’ve met with several ex colleagues who have had their entire teams laid off and former FTEs who have had to take major pay cuts as contractors. I’ve also heard of more rounds of layoffs coming up. I went over to Microsoft the other morning to have coffee with an ex colleague and it’s a ghost town. No one in conference rooms or offices. Maybe people are working from home but it sure felt very different.
That email resonated with me so strongly, because she is right.
Vast hordes of tech workers have already been laid off, and more will be hitting the bricks soon.
But the tech industry is supposed to be one of our economic bright spots.
If things are this bad for the tech industry, what does this say about the economy as a whole?
Most of the jobs that are still available at this point pay very little. Jobs that actually pay enough to support a middle class lifestyle have been disappearing, and millions of white collar workers find themselves on the outside looking in. The following comes from a Business Insider article entitled “Welcome to the white-collar recession”…
Over the past year or so, pretty much everyone who’s looked for a job has told me the same thing: The job market is brutal right now. They’ve applied to dozens if not hundreds of openings, only to get one or two callbacks. No one’s hiring, they tell me. I’ve never seen it this bad.
Yes.
I have heard the same things over and over again too.
And it is getting worse with each passing day.
On Wednesday, we learned about even more layoffs at Google…
Google fired approximately 200 employees and relocated some of the jobs overseas – the latest sign of a long-running effort by the Big Tech firm to cut costs and restructure itself.
The job cuts — announced internally on the eve of Google’s blowout first-quarter earnings report — targeted members of Google’s “core” team, which works on the “technical foundation behind the company’s flagship products” as well as the online safety of users and its global IT infrastructure, according to its website.
At least 50 of the roles were based at Google’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. Google is expected to hire replacement workers for the roles in Mexico and India, CNBC reported, citing a review of internal documents.
Large companies all over America are looking to “trim the fat”, and that often means giving the axe to expensive older workers.
There is very little loyalty in the corporate world today. You may have given 20 years of your life to a company, but the moment you become expendable they will dump you like a hot potato.
Millions of small businesses are really struggling right now too.
During the month of April, 43 percent of all small business renters in the United States were not able to pay their rent in full. The last time we witnessed anything like this was during the lockdowns that were instituted during the early stages of the pandemic…
A significant number of small businesses across the nation are struggling to pay rent due to skyrocketing costs, a recent study by business networking platform Alignable found.
The company’s latest Small Business Rent report, published on Friday, found that 43 percent of small business renters in the U.S. were unable to pay their rent in full and on time in the month of April. Such a high delinquency rate hasn’t been reported in the U.S. since March 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it reached 49 percent.
The delinquency rate was also four percentage points higher than in March, making it the largest month-over-month surge in over a year, according to data analyzed by Alignable.
We don’t have a disease to blame this time around.
Sadly, conditions are only going to get tougher for small businesses in the months ahead as sales dry up.
Meanwhile, the total number of retail stores in the U.S. closed so far in 2024 is up to nearly 2,600…
US retailers confirmed another 169 closures last week – bringing the total so far this year up to almost 2,600.
Stores that announced the shuttering of locations included Express, Outfox Hospitality, Shop ‘n Save, Urban Outfitters and Walmart.
We are in the midst of another retail apocalypse.
Why aren’t we hearing more about this?
On top of everything else, Chicago PMI is dropping at the fastest pace that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008….
After miraculously surging to two years highs in Nov 2023, Chicago PMI has plunged for five straight months, with the last four months seeing the MoM declines accelerating. Against expectations of a rise to 45.0 (from March’s 41.4), April’s PMI data printed 37.9
That is the worst five-month collapse since Lehman…
With everything that is going on, how in the world can anyone possibly claim that the economy “is in good shape”?
Economic activity is slowing down, mass layoffs are happening all over the country, and the cost of living is absolutely crushing the middle class.
More people are falling out of the middle class every day, and at this point there are tens of millions of Americans that are either considered to be either living in poverty or among the ranks of the “working poor”….
Over time, higher costs and sluggish wage growth have left more Americans financially vulnerable, with many known as “ALICEs.”
Nearly 40 million families, or 29% of the population, fall in the category of ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed — according to United Way’s United for ALICE program, which first coined the term to refer to households earning above the poverty line but less than what’s needed to get by.
That figure doesn’t include the 37.9 million Americans who live in poverty, comprising 11.5% of the total population, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Collectively, the two categories discussed above now comprise more than 40 percent of the total population.
And if you think that things are bad now, just wait until you see the suffering that will happen during the tremendous chaos that is dead ahead of us.
It took decades of very foolish decisions to get us here, and now we are at a historic tipping point.
Our economy is literally breaking down right in front of our eyes, and the path before us is going to be filled with so much pain.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
About the Author: Michael Snyder’s extremely controversial new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com. He has also written seven other books that are available on Amazon.com including “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing. You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter. Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites. You can connect with Michael on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and sharing his articles on your own social media accounts is definitely a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.
I work in tech at a Fortune 100 company. Plus, I talk to people and keep tabs on things. I like to know which way the wind is blowing. Jobs now are paying around a third less than what they were a couple of years ago. If you look through the major job sites, you’re mostly going to see the same listings month in and month out. Staffing companies are not able to find clients easily right now.
Even at my own company, I’ve been seeing “night and fog” lately, where you will be walking by and see an empty desk where someone used to sit. No announcement, no rumors, they are just gone. Junior or senior, doesn’t matter. And that is in essential departments. It is creepy and weird.
The people in tech who should be the most worried right now are contractors, offshore and on, and the “PowerPoint jockeys,” whose skills are largely in doing presentations. Onshore contractors are too expensive, offshore ones are too incompetent for the most part. If you are a person who can keep the lights on, you are going to be safer than some others. It depends on the company, but senior people are often safer than junior ones now, because they can do the work of three or four junior ones and have a ton of knowledge. Not that way everywhere, of course. There are also a ton of inept people in the field who wanted to make big bucks quick, went through “boot camps,” and wound up in positions where their lack of experience has caused breaches and losses. I regularly work with official Microsoft open-source code, and the defects and issues with their stuff is surprisingly common. This is from the largest computing company in the world.
Cost-cutting has been a huge thing. Cloud computing costs are rising and predicted to rise even more. Everyone forgets that the “cloud” is just a bunch of computers sitting in large buildings all over the world. They need power, water, maintenance, and people. There was a major outage not too long ago attributed to Microsoft not having enough people to do literal damage control. All those costs are going up, so computing costs are rising as well, which means another contribution to overall prices. More so than normal, cost cutting has been huge where I am, and people are starting to reconsider the cloud, because of costs.
If I were giving advice to a young person about how to break into the field, I would tell them how to use a hammer, tractor, or welder. Between automation, AI-powered programming, and maturing technology, the field is drying up. This was one thing America had going for it for a long time, the lead in tech. It’s not that someone else has taken it over, it’s just that there is no longer really anyone leading anything now. Horrible economic policies, devaluation of the dollar, choosing appearance over substance, and the maturation of computing as a whole, means that innovation isn’t there any longer.
Last, if I worked at a bank right now, I think I’d quit and take up something else. The politicians have been busy playing red vs blue, and convincing everyone that social issues matter, but more and more people I talk to are starting to figure out that most politics is just theater and the real control over their lives happens somewhere besides D.C. When banks begin to fail, it will be a tsunami, and people everywhere are going to be wiped out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see people affiliated with banks decorating lamp poles like wreaths at Christmas. Anger, brought on by desperation, is an ugly thing and can get out of hand very quickly, and if people are willing to go nuts protesting a middle eastern war that doesn’t involve them at all, what are they going to do when they find all their money is gone or simply worthless?
I have no words for what lies just ahead. Over 10 years ago (12 to be exact) as a police officer we did MAC TAC training, Multi-Assault Counter Terrorism Action Capability.
http://www.tacticalavenues.com/index.php/mactac
We were flat out told by Federal agents that helped with the training that about a decade or so down the road all hell would break lose. There will be political and economic chaos where the most effected, those in the inner cites, out of the desire to live, will come to the suburbs just to survive. We will have multiple shootings daily and in the really bad areas they will bring police from stable parts of the country and if martial law is invoked, a UN treaty will be activated to bring in the blue helmet police. These plan is on the table. They will be more likely to use force against American's than Americans will.
In 2018 at a Meeting in the St Louis FED (I was in attendance) that everything the FED did between 2008-2018 failed to kick start the economy. They know this will fail, but they would not say when and how just that it's coming. Plus the FED will be in control and guide this nation in the post dollar world.
Then latter in 2018 at a high level military briefing, there was an assessment that between the 2020 to the 2024 elections economic and political instability will skyrocket in America and three wars will start, Europe, the Middle East and in the pacific. The estimate was the first encounter with China will not be Taiwan but a test of the waters with the first action on one of China's military islands, there was no mention of a 2024 election outcome. My understanding is that we don't get there.
Every thing is pointing to the here and now.
What is truly grievous, is the shear numbers of people that are going to be swallowed up in this mess. God does not rejoice in the judgement. My heart is burdened for all that will be lost and rebel in what is coming for it will be many. What really bothers me is there are those who claim Christ but who take a huge delight in the judgment coming on the earth for so many or are anxious for people to get what "they" deserve. In reality we even in our best Christian Sanctified state still fall way short and in reality deserve the same judgement, except for the covering we receive by faith via God's grace, we are covered with His perfect righteousness. That perfect righteousness is not ours it's a free gift from God. Just as the 24 elders worship God by casting their crowns of righteousness at the feet of Christ, this shows they humbly worship Christ and their rewards are all by God's grace and we are to be eternally grateful He chose us and those crown come from Him by grace and grace alone, something we do not deserve . Thus we need to walk humbly before our God and not in self-righteousness.
Micah 2: 3 Behold, I am planning against this family a calamity From which you cannot remove your necks; And you will not walk (haughtily- proudly; arrogantly; with contempt or disdain) And you will not walk haughtily,
Micah 6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God?
Ezekiel 33
Now as for you, son of man, say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus you have spoken, saying, “Surely our transgressions and our sins are upon us, and we are rotting away in them; how then can we survive?”’ Say to them, ‘As I live!’ declares the Lord God, ‘I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways!
Agape love does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth 1 Cor. 13.
In Romans 11 Paul warns the gentile church not to become spiritually arrogant, we were grafted in against nature by grace alone and if we are not careful we can just as easily be grafted out.