Drunk with Easy Money, companies were hogging office space and workers for a future that did not come.
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Vruses turrning beaurocrats brains to mush is a very applicable metaphor over the past few years.
The best way to learn is by mistakes, as it effects your brain to change more deeply,
Going forward we will see if we all learn from the mistakes that were made over the past few years.
Not all was mistakes. In these social media cum tech companies, executives and their managers were rewarded for:
1. Removing efficient automation maintained by small team in favor of inefficient solutions that required a 10 times bigger team in name of customer experience and scalability.
2. Empire building became the name of the game as the more the people you hire under you, the faster the executives got promoted.
3. All that was needed was to show some kind of value without any real regards to profitability. It could be endless unmaintainable public api, higher revenue, subscriber growth, funny money, customer sentiment or even visible quid pro quo.
These executivesare not leaders, they are empire builders. Expect significant pain ahead.
It is a mess out there. We all been watching it lately you can miss it. My concern is the other business layoffs and closing. All we are talking about is TECH TECH.
Thanks
Where my brother works ,warehouse liquor distributor can’t get any help that stays or wants to work keep raising wages . 18.50$ to start in Omaha .Never seen anything like this in my lifetime,younger people seem to realize they’ll never have anything so why try
Flea is right. It is not entitlements either. It is the cost of living and the financialization of everything. Why participate in a system in which you will never benefit from your labor?
Agree 100% with what Leo said here. As soon as a tech company becomes dominant, the most hard working and most productive part of the workforce gets shunted aside by make-work empire builders with mediocre employees.
Prime example: “Product managers”
Anyone know whether Google fired more product managers than engineers? Or were the PMs so entrenched by diversity considerations that they could only be fired at the same proportion?
That’s every company.
My 20 year experience in tech says this is entirely accurate. The management ranks are filled with people who have failed up their entire careers. Actual accomplishments and operational efficiency are despised.
Nothing that 50% layoffs couldn’t fix, if the correct 50% were laid off. Of which I have little confidence. I recall one operations VP reporting that he had inadvertently laid off his automated inventory control system. He had no idea how his business worked or which employees were critical, which is very common.
Are you calling Product Managers ‘mediocre employees’?
Failing upwords is not just tech, as evidenced by the health care industry. Those who can’t, manage, and then keep bumbling their way up the corporate ranks.
Man this Btc high tech simply won’t die. Higher price than before FTX bankruptcy. Even the genesis bankruptcy didnt seem to affect the price. That and strong gold price trying to tell us something?
Fed is incompetent and so speculation remains the name of the game.
Why would BTC die when real rates remain negative?
Bitcoin may be crap, but its fans trust that it can’t be printed and so has 0 onterest rate that are better than -ve interest rates on everything else today.
These fans simply ignore the facts that:
1. It has no value and is backed by nothing.
2. Anyone can create another crypto.
3. It’s transaction costs are too high to use as currency.
4. It’s technology is too primitive and actually sucks in that there are too many loopholes despite such expensive computing.
That, or maybe you’ve got it completely wrong?
…but he likes gold.
Please enlighten us.
Blockchain is an ever-increasing database and every new transaction has an ever-increasing compute cost @ O(n). If this cost is trimmed, the integrity of blockchain is lost (e.g. etherium).
Gold is backed by the physical metal, by being a store of value proven by history, by central banks hoarding it, by its use in jewelry etc.
The British empire robbed the whole world of Gold only to send most of it to US in exchange for weapons during second world war. Germany lost the war, UK survived but lost its superpower status, and US with most of UK’s gold and a powerful war industry became the new Superpower!
If it isn’t Bitcoin, it will be AltAnything so long as DC systematically confiscates already taxed accumulated wealth via money printing.
Focusing on the symptoms and not the cause will never lead to a solution.
Best guess. Investors are starting to pay attention to statements made by Freedom Caucus members, their plan is to shut down the govt and force a default. Their goal is defund the federal govt in favor of states rights. The next few weeks should be very interesting.
That may be true. However, the ultra-liberal Constitutionalists must be pointing to the 14th Amendment.
“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
The debt ceiling is raised to pay past debt. Personally, I think the debt ceiling should be imposed for future debt.
Personally, I think the debt limit should be absolute, stupid expenditures to be unpaid first, and the limit itself set by national direct vote by all TAXPAYERS, based on the amount that they personally are ok with being on the hook for.
Re: TheRealmrDyno
Are you seriously advocating for direct democracy in a constitutional republic? I would love to see it, but be careful what you wish for.
Kurtis,
Not exactly – note that I said taxpayers.
If the general innumerate public were aware of the magnitude of the fraction of the total debt that they personally were on the hook for, it might be of a magnitude that they could relate to. I think they would vote to reduce the limit, the never ending increasing of which seems to me to be an existential national problem.
So, only let those who will actually pay vote on the debt limit. They will at least know how much they are really getting charged, as debt funded spending moves to current-tax funded spending.
TheRealMrDyno…
How about votes get weighted by the income tax paid over the last 10 years? If you pay more, why shouldn’t you get more say?
And/or, how about every person gets slapped with their pro-rata share of the debt? Payment plans available for those who can’t afford to pay their share now.
“stupid expenditures to be unpaid first,”
The problem is that “stupid” is in the eye of the beholder.
@Seen it all,
You didn’t finish your sentence. “The problem is that stupid is in the eye of the beholder”… and the beholders are pretty damn stupid.
“The debt ceiling is raised to pay past debt.”
How about suing over the constitutionality of having incurred various types, tiers, and tranches of our 100%+ GDP debt?
There have been “ultra vires” (beyond legal authority) lawsuits that have voided muni debt historically.
I wonder what the actual detailed history of legal challenges to Fed debt looks like.
Must have occurred (right?) but funny how actual case names are unknown.
Is the USA the only country that has this sort debt ceiling? This law doesn’t seem to be helping the USA in reducing the deficit or the debt!
This is public debt, no one thinks it will be ‘paid back’ in any meaningful way. It’s just for Lolz, but better than all that other foreign debt 😉
Financialization has completely detached from the economy, and reality. There will be a reckoning, this time is no different, and so on.
I thought they were all in favor of the ‘fair tax’ plan? Eliminating all federal taxes and replacing them with a 30% national sales tax?
30%!! Surely you jest! Incredibly regressive. Give the lower and middle working classes a break, for a change.
So rich people can live and buy everything outside the US and pay a zero income tax… That kind of “fair”?
More likely the income tax system remains AND they start a national sales tax.
Don’t you remember what happened last time? The Republicans forced a government shutdown and started taking political blame for it, so they caved. They took a beating in the polls. Blame for any shutdown and related fallout falls on those who force it.
Hopefully they’ll be smarter this time around, raise the debt ceiling, and pass bills to cut specific cost cuts as part of a budgeting project. Unfortunately, this would require hard work, ethics, and honest deliberation, which go beyond the capabilities and desires of current political leaders. Today’s leaders like to pander to shallow instincts of the masses, rather than inform and educate them about key issues.
Pres. Biden is saying “no negotiation” on the debt ceiling. This stance sounds the same as when they were dealing with the Russians over Ukraine at this same time last year. What has that gotten us (the world) in the last 11 months? At some point in the future (maybe now) there will be enough “crazies” in Congress that they will call his bluff and things will turn to “the brown stuff” for all of us. The “crazies” will get blamed, just as the Russians are being blamed, but they don’t care. There will be a lot of casualties, both human and social, but that is the aim of these fringe politicians. I don’t want my family or me to be subject to this kind of tussling on the brink but we may not have a choice.
Biden remembers negotiating is a wage of time from his days as VP. Spend 6 months negotiating and then they will still vote against.
” What has that gotten us (the world) in the last 11 months? ”
A debilitated Russia ever closer to defeat and outright disintegration. The greatest FP victory for America in the past 30 years plus.
They only took the political blame because the media is on the side of the left. The right said “We won’t increase the limit unless you do X” and the left refused to do X. So the left were just as culpable, as they held the power to get it done as well, but the media cheerled for the left.
#Cytotoxic.
Russia as a failed state and disintegrating may be bad new for the rest of Europe and no good news for USA either.
Seems unlikely. The Freedom Caucus is ~ 20 members. As we saw under Trump, a sufficient number of Democrats will join with Republicans to pass a budget that both parties (i.e., their donors) want.
“That and strong gold price trying to tell us something?”
Not anything that we don’t already know. We are near the pinnacle peak of the biggest liquidity and credit bubble in the history of mankind, and the FED just shat the bed by pulling back on rate hikes. They should have continued at 75 basis points until the fed funds rate hit CPI.
Instead, they have concocted a “soft landing” narrative and associated methodology that is as laughable as “transitory,” whereby they stop short of truly stemming inflation and popping the bubbles and instead try to levitate them in an unnatural state. In turn, prices are roaring back.
“In turn, prices are roaring back.”
There’s scant evidence of that. RE is continuing down. The fed continues to take out 95 billion per month by QE. Prices can’t sustainably go up even with the tightening we’ve had.
I’m not talking about houses, I am talking about stocks, crypto, commodities and everything else. Have you seen the rip? Or are you just ignoring that?
In real time (not reflected in the official data–*yet*), RE is actually enjoying a nice bump these last few weeks. But never mind that; the person you’re replying to was talking about the simultaneous rallies in stocks, bonds, and crypto. Markets are laughing in the Fed’s face, expecting them to cave despite the tough talk. And it’s not an unreasonable expectation. Nobody has forgotten about what happened in 2019.
There’s a theory out there that the Fed Reserve slowed down their rate hikes because Japan started selling US bonds due to inflation even though fed reserve preferred going faster w hikes, in order to save the bond market? Just heard this one today.
I don’t understand quite understand this theory, but I don’t think this size of bubble can result in a soft landing either so maybe there’s some super secret plan without screwing over the savers…?
That theory you heard is quite funny — I mean silly. The BOJ sold Treasuries to obtain the dollars to buy yen with in order to prop up the yen which was spiraling down. And it worked.
I actually think the interest rates are less of the issue right now than the balance sheet. They refuse to actually try in good faith to destroy the money they printed during the “emergency,” which was supposed to be “temporary.”
$400 billion when you printed $4 trillion doesn’t qualify.
Yes. And if central banks truly disliked high inflation, they’d be talking about reversing the CPI increases for a period of time to offset the 20% inflation we’ll be seeing in the 2021 to 2023 period. The fact they aren’t talking about reversing the inflation (by encouraging a period of deflation) is illuminating as to their true motivations, which is to inflate away debts at high inflation rates. Anybody who owns a lot of long bonds deserves what they get, after witnessing this behavior.
Thank you for mentioning GOLD! Most do not understand that PM’s (Gold/Silver) will be “the last man” standing. The ONLY crypto that will be left is the only one with Utility- XRP!!! ALL the rest will go to zero value because there is no value!
Oliver Kahn B.Munich CEO on Bloomberg
A few thoughts.
I work in a larger semi high tech company. Attrition is approaching 10% as raises don’t keep up with inflation and folks are jumping ship to take a job with a higher salary. So how much is big tech relying on attrition and not layoffs to get to where they want to go as far as staffing levels?
There are viral YT videos of a day in the life of a Twitter employee before the Musk purchase. No work getting done but amazing perks, like better than most vacations. After watching, you know these companies are doomed if there are no radical changes.
So how much is big tech relying on attrition and not layoffs to get to where they want to go as far as staffing levels?
The answer evidently is: Too much
(Not trolling you)
The low pay isn’t creating the desired turnover and so they have to layoff staff. Another question that might be asked is “How far up the payscale do layoffs have to go to achieve the cost cuts necessary to insure survival?”
I have been subject to the “Shrink to Profitability” method of labor management and the requisite displacements to take it or leave it “openings” at less pay several times in my commercial airline career. Its vicious.
It is vicious.
And management never seems to figure out, until it is too late, that the folks who jump ship first/quickest are usually your best and most productive employees.
“folks who jump ship first/quickest are usually your best and most productive”
It’s because in the era of money printing, the management gained from losing productive people. It would require replacing them with a bigger unproductive team that helped with both empire building and quick promotions for managers on account of team size!
half…the other half hates the place, contributes little, jumps at the severance.
Whenever the company I worked for had layoffs I always volunteered because I had several other jobs lined up and I wanted the severance package. Needless to say, they never took me up on my offers.
AV8R, sounds like we used to work for the same company. My current airline took all the free money given in 2020 and instead of using it to retain employees, their brains turned to mush and they used it to offer buyouts. For over a year they’ve been screaming about being short staffed and hiring like crazy. This year they plan on hiring ‘the most ever’. I wonder if they will end up scaling back once the recession hits.
The horrible thing is that the companies were paid to retain employees during the pandemic.
If they used the money to provide early golden parachutes, then they should have to pay it back.
They used the PPP money to offer early retirement and buyouts to their most senior ( read expensive ) employees.
The plan was to then hire new employees at the bottom of the wage scale.
Except it became difficult, if not impossible to hire employees at the bottom of the wage scale. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There is an article on the Google layoffs on CNBC.com now. Widespread complaints and the reasons behind who was put on the list.
I have one theory to partly account for it. Its potentially at least quota based but not going further than that. If true, it’s ironic that the employee base probably overwhelmingly agrees with this ideology, except when it applies to them.
One employee also complained about it due to the company’s most recent quarterly profit ($17B), as if staffing decisions should be based on that. No company is a social services organization which primarily exists to provide anyone employment, much less at some arbitrary compensation they think they deserve.
When the ad market crashes later, they will have a lot more to complaint about. Google has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the credit mania and the fake “growth” that goes with it.
” If true, it’s ironic that the employee base probably overwhelmingly agrees with this ideology, except when it applies to them.”
Isn’t that true of all failed hypocritical policies?
I got laid off on Friday 5th Jan 2001. Working at a IT consulting company out of Boston at the time. The company was robbing their clients massively, and that’s putting it lightly. I was on a project which has about 200 people, where the work could have been done by 5-10. We all flew in on Monday, stayed at the local hotels (Avg night cost atleast $200), and flew back on Friday. I played games, read books, sometimes did not show up for a couple days or so, no one noticed or cared. After 3 months I realized the danger of skill set degradation and asked to leave. Took 3 more months of complaining to get kicked off the project. Went back to bench at my Chicago office and started learning a new technology with a couple other fellows who were also between projects. The Chicago office was fully stocked with all kinds of booze, food was ordered in daily. On Fridays the office manager took us down to a strip joint. All this was on company dime, by robbing clients. Needless to say massive layoffs followed, right as 2001 started. I was in the first wave since I was on bench. Got a pretty generous severance package. The following waves of layoffs were progressively less generous. The tech I learnt on bench provided a job in a week and kept me going for about 15 years.
“The tech I learnt on bench provided a job in a week and kept me going for about 15 years.”
@SomethingStinks, as a fellow tech worker I’m curious to know what tech you learned while sitting on the bench.
Used to be called Content Management System, made by company called Interwoven …. pretty good software at the time. Took some skill and patience getting it to work on a Solaris 7 server. But once it was set, it could keep going for ever. We setup a dummy site, created some templates for the pages, and setup deployments. Trust me, with a well thought out dummy deployment, you can learn a lot.
That is a pretty esoteric CMS (no client ever hear of WordPress, with about a bazillion users/developers…).
What insanely rich/stupid clients have paid for 15 years of esoteric product customization/support?
The “Big Dig” in Boston became known as the “Big Swig”. They are always having problems with the tunnel.
My quote from the early 1990’s:
“Nobody is indispensable, including the CEO, and if they think so, they are hurting our business. However, it may hurt a lot if we let them go. Indispensability is the result of mismanagement.”
A good manager will work as a team and share responsibilities and goals.
There are star players, and they should be rewarded. However, not to the point of where they know everything and share nothing with the rest of the team.
Before Musk purchase twitter has 10k plus employees including contractors
Now they have less than 1k.
Is Twitter failing ?
“Is Twitter failing ?”
Twitter was failing before Musk purchased it. He’s trying to save what was always a sinking ship.
Twitter is a worse user experience now that before. More spam for one thing. Musk doesn’t really know what he’s doing, this was a midlife crisis impulse buy.
Filthy rich men don’t have to suffer “midlife crises”.
That was the niche the guy who hung himself in his jail cell found and exploited so well. Forgot name.
It’s one of the biological evolutionary traits that cultural evolution just couldn’t over come (for most)…. even religion couldn’t.
“Law”, however, works just fine on poor people who have it, and produced large and lucrative “service” industries to exploit it.
I kinda suspect it was related to excess “other directed” ambition traits, and maybe things like short guy complex, being a nothing in HS, etc, etc.
Completely agree with the gist of the report. One should ignore the hyperbole in the media about the recent layoffs and take things in perspective. Yes, tech giants (ex. Twitter) like Facebook, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon are laying off a modest 2-5% of their staff, but that is after having increased their headcount by a preposterous 50% to 100% in the past 2-3 years. I kid you not! They have really increased their number of employees by that much in a very short period of time!
These layoffs were a foregone conclusion of insane corporate policies fueled by free money. If anything, I’m surprised they’re only reducing headcounds by low single percentages and not more.
Agreed, The current tech layoffs are mostly global, and are mostly focussed at recruitment, HR, Sales and administration. So the 6% layoffs won’t cut costs by more than 1% to 2% as the highest employee expenses are local and in engineering cogs. So this first round is just messaging and is more of lip service to investors.
Leo,
Do you predict that there will be real layoffs in the future? If so, when? You’re one of the most knowledgable commenters here. I’d love to hear your opinion.
not LEO but my opinion is based on being in “The Tech Biz” for a few decades.
The master of the current thinking towards layoffs is NETFLIX. 20+ years ago they started their process of the annual 5-10% culling of the ranks. Even included the practice marking people down in the rankings/ratings to meet the numbers. PATTY MCCORD was the first HR clown at NFLX and she and REED HASTINGS finetuned the practice. There is a much touted Slide Deck that shows how it works. Books have been written, Documentaries have been made, Fortunes have been made.
Islandteal, that “annual 5-10% cull” was a “Jack Welch special”, a GE-promoted “best practice”, and also common on Wall Street, long before NFLX found it.
Some bad ideas never die. There are far better ways to maintain strong team productivity.
As per my above comment.
If you grew headcount by 50% over three years you only need to cut it 33% to get back to start.
If attrition is 10% per year…easy!
And you can pump that number with 3% average raises in an 8%+ inflation environment.
50% is the minimum. Here are the percentage headcount increases for big tech companies in the past 3 years:
Google: 58%
Amazon: 98%
Facebook: 93%
Microsoft: 54%
What are all these people doing?
I have been working with a tech recruiter to bring in an executive position at my company. The recruiter exclusively places VP level and up, and has significant insider information, just through conversations with these people. The recruiter told me that these Q4/Q1 layoffs of 2-5% of total headcount are likely the first wave and that another wave will occur in late Q2 / early Q3 if the economy continues to slow, as is expected.
Empirically, this approach is rational, and you can already see Google preparing for this by updating it’s employee rating system to achieve a lower headcount . Headcount at these mega-cap tech companies is >50% of pre-pandemic levels, but inflation adjusted revenue is falling back to pre-pandemic levels, so it’s difficult to justify the high staffing levels.
Amazon was expanding their distribution centers when everyone was locked down due to COVID, buy now that things have opened up again and inflation has exploded, people aren’t buying as much stuff. so that’s a natural push for layoffs. As for Facebook, they have already peaked at the number of users they can recruit and the ad money was about to dry up, so Zuckerberg went full throttle on this metaverse only for it to flop. Not sure why Google hired so many people unless they were adding to their YouTube division, but they’re having the same issues with the ad market drying up.
Intel, AMD, MU…are injured, but KLAC and ASML are moving up.
For example, if you examine high-tech companies that produce SW it is often a very few people who produce product and are essential to the operation. These organizations often have significant extraneous bloat that in good times is easily supported.
Typically, from this core group of high-performing contributors you see other people eventually glomming on in supporting roles. As Leo mentioned above, these other folks are often siloed into organizations that become fiefdoms.
Executives are seeing the days of easy money fade and are reducing staff to maintain profitability. Often times this cleansing exercise is very helpful to the organization. i.e. you gain balance by right sizing revenue/employee
The danger no one seem to realize yet is that core high performance team is not going to last forever. Who are you going to replace them with? The current extremely fragile generation that needs a safe space to retreat to every few hours? Why would anyone want to be in the core team anymore? The upper management takes a massive chunk of profits the core team generates, and the unproductive but well connective excess sucks up a sizeable portion of the rest. Add to that now companies are hiring based on their diversity goals instead of skill sets so more fun on the way.
“Add to that now companies are hiring based on their diversity goals instead of skill sets so more fun on the way.”
I am seeing this at my company.
“The danger no one seem to realize yet is that core high performance team is not going to last forever. Who are you going to replace them with?”
At my company, management’s answer to this question is to off shore the work to our division in India.
Harvey,
Some solution here.
We won’t know the company results of this for years. Management bonuses will be secure with cost cutting.
In the short term, it will likely be ugly. It takes awhile to train a new team.
In the long term for the US, it may be ugly.
Depending on the President and their focus on Defense and the economy, this may not last long.
For at least twenty five years, there’s been a general downward push in treasury rates, somewhat related to easy Fed policies, somewhat related to declining money velocity , which connects to money hoarding.
Money hoarding and modern financial innovations have obviously turned global economies into global casinos, which resulted in long term decline in global productivity.
While money has increasingly become more inefficient, an obvious increase in global technology monopolies have created a world that depends on the Moore’s Law phenomenon of exponential faster processing abilities, that spill into a world of less productive humans.
While computer processing evolves into AI worshiping, fewer and fewer people will become more productive or necessary.
The need for less office space, fewer engineers is all about efficiency performed by fewer people. It’s the inverse of Moore’s Law, where society will need fewer people to process information.
Just as chip companies seek new ways to combine composite layers of materials that allow for faster chips, human skills will be minded for next generation tasks.
I agree with Wolf, that the pending recession will become a platform to reduce headcount and trim fat. I also think AI will be used to sift through data to search for redundancies, looking at new innovative ways for trimming fat, the equivalent combination of human employment as a processed chicken nugget.
The interesting thing about a super efficient, almost fascist world is to wonder where revenue generation will come from, to support draconian efficiency. If people are tossed aside like ants in a pile, how does the perpetual motion machine of technology feed itself.
Maybe this is where crypto and NFT become necessary as we prepare ourselves to convert 401ks, pension plans and social security accounts into meta verse wastelands.
Nostradamus
“AI will be used to sift through data to search for redundancies, …”
All those identified as “redundant” will be reassigned to the Teams that will build the “next generation” of AI to identify redundant employees in the organization! Of, course, following reassignment, salaries and perks will be increased substantially.
The real question isn’t how efficient “tech” has become or isn’t. It’s whether what they create is of any actual value at all.
A lot of it isn’t. If it did not exist, it’s not like it would make any difference.
There is always the search for the next big tech thing. It has worked in the past for some but has left a trail of tears for many more others.
This time won’t be different.
There are dozens of profitless unicorns who claim they offer “AI driven cloud solutions to provide data insight and customer management”. Many have been in business for over a decade and employ thousands in very expensive cities like SF. What could possibly go wrong?
Although I am a Capitalist to the bone I was a dual major in accounting and philosophy in order to complete the goal of working in the CPA realm then segue to law school becoming a tax attorney. Hated sitting in a chair on a computer all day so ditched the idea….
When I asked my account professor to answer a statement in a philosophy class that “endless growth is not logically possible” I cringed at the truth in this statement. This is where the basic income comes in????
Need about 50% of the world to “disappear” and it is now possible to do this in many ways….. Sobering thoughts for sure….
Almost fascist? Fascism has already won in the USA, it’s the Corpo-state and the Uniparty. The rest is noise/propaganda.
I am going to summarize some of my experience with various industrial clients. They are not hiring new people in IT department even though the maga tech ex employee are available in the market. Over past years they have got their existing employee (who were and still are paid much less then current average tech person) from other departments trained in the required technology, and now these employee are working in their IT department.
All industrial clients I know are not hiring tech and some are actively doing layoffs in tech department.
I have seen many “tech guys” bafoozle their employers as many had no clue what metrics to use. Now, more and more people understand that most of the tech people are not worth the pay taken…
I am about to start businesses related to content/copy writing in relation to SEO and all forms of social media as a last major business venture and so far it has been enlightening and invigorating.
In short, a new best selling book is titled “Social Engineering” which is what we are well into now and economics is the biggest aspect of this phenomenon.
As I am in my late 60s there is no time to lose. Another text to check out is “Ultralearning” by Scott Young. The essence of this text is to compress your learning into shortest time possible in creating your own curriculum for rapid learning to reinvent in hyper-time. I’m doing it and it is working. The text is full of amazing examples of what I am doing….
I will succeed or die trying so it is a no lose proposition either way because retirement is not for me even though I have more than most.
I would rather die on the “battlefield” than wither away.
When I look at the young, grey skinned techo rats drinking Monster drinks I see lots of diabetes, varicose veins from constant sitting, and general early death due to the lifestyle of a male computer people dying off young.
Easy money virus turning brains to mush: Nice idea, but weren’t these same brains already mush to begin with? Else how to have so misperceived reality every foot of the way when the flow of easy money was loosed on the world by greedy bankers and greedy politicians who eagerly joined in the fray (or maybe one should say instead the froth)? It took massive collective brain mushiness and cooperation from those elements to begin the current mess, unless one has a darker, more sinister explanation to offer. Just noting that cause is not alway obvious from effects. Easy money itself was an effect. Now as to the cause of that, recognising that the printing press was merely a means, surely there’s more to be said.
Re: drunk with easy money
Tech layoffs are threads of social media fabrics that connect everyone to the stupidity of smartphone simplicity.
The allure of a continuance of non-stop partying is what this global casino is all about. Even after a significant meltdown in assets, and after the pending recession decimates ever stupid person, they’ll all eventually be pulled back into partying.
The next games are being refined and the next parties will be even more exciting, more addicting and the mass hallucinations will be shared by more people. It’s a bet that can’t fail… obviously, all these tech bankruptcies, layoffs, needless office space are all going to dissipate into better opportunities, where all this stuff can easily be tokenized. What’s the problem, just chill!
Niecon, has partnered with NFT Real Estate Platform All Set by Xillion (XIL). They will tokenize, fractionalize, and sell several luxury villas worth over $3MM in small pieces starting at $10 per piece.
I worked in London for a startup in a trendy shared office space, it had a party every two weeks with free booze. Elsewhere Facebook were doing free events with little gifts, you went to some of the meetup events and got free alcohol and pizza and t-shirts. So it was a kind of frenzy. Why though? The startup I worked at I thought had a premise that would never work and thats what happened.
I think its just that cheap (negative interest rates) money coincided with whats effectively a tech lottery i.e. you fund the right one and the payback is 1000x your investment. What I mean is that it was only every a coincidence of two things at the same time. Cheap money during a gold rush.
People on the economics blogs forget that while for example, everything I know about economics has come from personal investigation at 35+ years of age, but there are others who get the truth of fiat when they are in their teens from knowledgeable parents. In fact, understand the continuous debasement of fiat currency is now the base of the UK class system (imo), the middle class go into debt to get their kids an apartment as soon as they are 20. Great strategy! Its the difference from my observations of how well my fellow uni people did. So these guys get out of fiat and into speculative investment asap. -Now-I know get out of fiat. Now. Not before. Not really until now at 50ish do i realise that borrowing rates were negative. Many others did.
Tech has existed as a series of gold rushes. First the OS wars, then the desktop apps, then the internet apps of 2000, then the mobile apps. But whats next and it seems nothing so they get laid off.
Going into massive debt at the peak of a massive real estate bubble is not a great financial strategy. It’s a belief in perpetual motion and path to financial ruin.
It was a great strategy when prices were much lower.
You and I believe that there is a massive RE bubble.
There are many younger who don’t. Too many. I appreciate optimism but worry about our younger generation who are acting like idiot lemmings.
Some of us are just devious. They will just buy and if things get very bad, they will expect a bankruptcy and bailout. Even presidents rely massively on bankruptcies and bailouts. That is sad. The current president would likely offer a massive bailout if a huge crash happens. The banks are no longer on the hook but the taxpayers are. I hope someone knows what they are doing at the top.
Some of the younger have some learning to do by experience. Others will take advantage of the system and become millionaires or presidents and declare bankruptcies and foreclose multiple times.
This will take awhile to settle.
You can’t have a bubble without lemmings.
If more folks were smart enough not to be lemmings, there wouldn’t be a bubble.
Back in the 2008 mess, many of us observers referred to the banksters (financial predators) as “wolves” and their all-too-willing victims as “sheeple”.
The big problem here is that it’s supposed to be the Fed’s job to rein in “irrational exuberance” before it gets bubbly, but instead, for the past 20-odd years the Fed has chosen to push “wealth effect” pro-bubble policies with nary a thought to the risks.
There’s also a segment of people that think that any problems can be bailed out by the U.S. government. But it’s clear at this point that the U.S. can only “bail out” anyone by borrowing or printing, both of which will cause massive inflation. The 2009-2021 experience was a blip in time that made people think deficits and bailouts were free.
They never were. The costs were just delayed.
…and growing, exponentially.
The facts are the facts, but the narrative, is psychology.
Fat profitable companies semi-decimating?
Romans decimated too, but not because they had too many soldiers!
and not over night.
1) Things look bad, but not bad enough.
2) SPX built enough cause to make a rd trip to 2020 high, a costly roller coaster for fun and entertainment.
3) Thereafter SPX might rise in stepping stones, first slowly, then faster,
like gold between 2011 and 2020 highs, or the 60’s/70’s Krishna inverse H&S analog.
4) SPX might build a huge cause to the left of the chart, all the way to May or June 2022 lows.
5) Then, SPX might reach/breach 2022 high, before the real mess, the shark bite start again…
Gen Z are playing online, all king of games, before they want to see/be in real action. Gen Z are the most prepared generation for real action, cost free, for fun, when the older generation will lose their money, or expire.
Thank you, Wolf! I have always been against easy money and mushy brains.
As an engineering member of a product in a large corporation that makes a profit, I feel I have been fairly paid, (I wish I was overpaid like some who have left or have been hired in the last 2 years). My argument is that we have walked away from millions in business with my product since the company has not focused on my product. There was a focus to hire in the latest and greatest in the last few years for the pie-in-the-sky products and not to grow the profitable products. Now we walk away from millions of dollars from customers because we are being overtaken by competition.
Bad planning and bad foresight. I expect my company stock to drop due to Wall Street punishing us. We could recover with a management focus change but we have lost 3 years to competition. Sad.
Maybe I should just join the competition for the same pay. I don’t expect outrageous pay raises at this point. They have better management and have potential for growth. I am hopeful that our management will wake up and smell the coffee.
The sad thing is that if it were personal finance, I would not have made these decisions.
Would you not pay your mortgage or credit card in the hope that investing the money in Bitcoin would shoot to the moon making you a millionaire?
Many companies lost sight of the basics that made them successful.
Hopefully, it isn’t terminal.
In the late 1980’s there was excessive real estate speculation. Small savings and loan banks invested savings account money in mortgages. There was excessive office building construction in the outer suburbs of Washington, D.C. A few office buildings were empty for years. An apartment building in Arizona was taken over by the Resolution Trust Corporation and managed until it could be sold. Almost a third of the savings and loan thrifts were bankrupt. There was a mild recession in 1990-1991. In 2005-2006 another real estate bubble had formed.
1) in the last 3Y AMZN expanded by 98%. For the B&H blue zone guys : AMZN ceo is the best in the world. AMZN went vertical, jumped too high.
2) Few years ago UPS and FDX ruled the waves and controlled every choke points in the air, sea and on land.
3) AMZN built an airline, a fleet of delivery vans, drones and USPS for the last miles. AMZN was fully committed to overcome UPS and FDX threats.
4) AMZN in space, the clouds, in the skies, drones, online, in retail, health, music, marshal art, and the in food business…
5) They made no money for decades, investing in the futures. But the futures was clogging in Savanna and Long Beach, just in time became half a year and China shut downs.
6) AMZN : take a profit when the market offer u. No B&H.
AMZN rode the wave and I hope you all joined them with cheap Chinese products and Free Shipping! It was like negative inflation for us. All Good Things Must Pass.
For every wave, there is a trough once the free money is spent.
I expect to pay more for US products and pay UPS/Fedex shipping in the near future. Is that bad or just post-free-money reality?
There goes inflation…..
The sad thing is that we have purchased a lifetime of cr*p on AMZN.
We are set until we die.
Though we have also purchased cheap essentials while avoiding the local grocery/convenience/department stores. Free Shipping! Why drive? How green but anti-local business at the same time?
There will be changes coming. More driving to local business. I need to buy a new bike or EV.
Sounds like I’m not the only one noticing Amazon’s slide… first, they mess with the music program and make changes that essentially ensure you now have to pay additional for what you more or less already had (of course, right after Prime renews) and I can’t remember the last time they brought something when they said they would. I have every intention of dropping Prime when it comes for renewal this year. It’s not the money, it’s the principle.
Amazon added 427,300 employees in 10 months during covid, bringing its global work force to more than 1.2 million. Some in 23 expect 500k amazon jobs go poof.
The next time you walk down the street 1 in 4 people you see will lose their job in the next 2 years.
Inflation will be with us until the end of this decade.
The fed will cave to inflation and resume printing money.
Hyperinflation is more probable than most people think.
The BOJ will raise rates either this y are or next and that will be the death of the dollar.
The US will be the epicenter of economic pain.
The Fed will loose all credibility and crowds will rush to gold for safety.
Main Street sees far higher inflation than the CPI tells.
There will be a continued move away from risk toward value. And international dividend bearing stocks not held down by a weak dollar are places investors will make money.
It will be a shock.
Most don’t see it coming.
Cnbc sell the books of their advertisers.
Keynesian and monetarists will get a rood awakening.
2023 will be a year to remember and many will want to never remember it.
In your scenario real estate may be the best place to store your money. The ultimate value play. Even if does continue to go down, at this point it will still fare better than other assets
the crowd might rush to DXY.
“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated” – U.S. Dollar
“There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.” – A. White-Swan
I started paying attention to AI-driven programs about 5 years ago, and for the past 2 years my attention has been undivided and total. In the beginning i was greatly impressed at how language translation software worked, and for free. I remember asking a group in Suzhou to develop a program that allowed me to take a photo or scan an image onto my phone, and translate from Mandarin Chinese to English. A month later it was already available, for free, on Weixin (Wechat), a Chinese social media app. It was spooky. Restaurant menus, warning signs in front of my building, documents—no problem. And with that—who needs high-priced translators anymore? Because at the same time, a handful of real-time voice translators also appeared, as good as Google Translate, so i can read any conversation as it’s happening, speak my response, and display my answer on my screen, or by native-language voice.
At the same time, other AI were writing poems, composing music, crunching numbers for investment banks and insurance companies, and—more ominously for people affected in Wolf’s piece—writing computer code. There is literally zero chance these technologies don’t radically affect employment in these fields, and countless more. And professionals and executives in these industries aren’t the minimum-wage burger flippers and cashiers that lost their jobs during robotic automation of service industries. Each job replaced at this level adds six figures in pure profit to companies’ bottom lines, for awhile, until the companies themselves go away.
“Restaurant menus, warning signs in front of my building, documents—no problem. And with that—who needs high-priced translators anymore? Because at the same time, a handful of real-time voice translators also appeared, as good as Google Translate, so i can read any conversation as it’s happening, speak my response, and display my answer on my screen, or by native-language voice.”
They must not be using that s/w for Chinese-English translations in Amazon listings. You can sniff out Chinese origin within a sentence/bullet or two. Realtime voice translators are impressive, but have a ways to go. NO DOUBT, they’ll get there.
I know what you mean. Most of those ads are so godawful they seem designed to steer the buyer back to an American brand.
Though my experiences with language AI, they’re now better than human translators. I am often accompanied by bilingual speakers, and the other side almost always has translators for themselves. The humans make more mistakes, try to impose their own view on what is being said, and are unable to handle routine English idioms. Worst of all, if they don’t know how to translate something, they’re supposed to ask me to repeat it using different words. Instead, to “save face”, they claim i said something that i did not rather than admit they didn’t understand me. Thankfully now I’m able to understand the Chinese translations of my words, and can stop the problem right away.
Give me a machine any time, one that doesn’t get his ego bruised, doesn’t need sleep, isn’t worrying about his situation at home, or worried about money, or is hung over from the night before, or is going through a breakup, or a million other things that distract from doing the job. And–I’m probably not far off from hoping for the same for my doctors and airline pilots.
“Worst of all, if they don’t know how to translate something, they’re supposed to ask me to repeat it using different words. Instead, to “save face”, they claim i said something that i did not rather than admit they didn’t understand me.”
Spot on.
…so often the easy road to serious conflict…
may we all find a better day.
You probably aren’t aware of all the hoopla over ChatGPT over the past month and a half. It’s part of the OpenAI project which was released on November 30, 2022. It can already translate into numerous different languages, not to mention write computer code, essays, stock tips, recipes, Lifetime/Hallmark movie scripts, etc. Educators are already freaking out at the prospect of their students using ChatGPT to write papers for them that they can’t detect was written by a machine.
Gottcha.
I think of translation like subtitles in film/TV. Close, accurate in spirit, but not exact. What you describe throws a whole nuther variable into the mix.
Sure, chatGPT can write tons of shoddy bugged code that someone has to unfucc later. Is it cheaper to hire a programmer or a code unfuccer? That’s the only question for capitalism.
Ai is dumb because it lacks context (understanding or meaning) of its information.
To the audio update by WR:
Probably the best 10-minute summary of zero-cost money, the plunge in future ad spending and why, the commercial RE boom and collapse in the Bay Area, Musk’s experiences at TWTR and lessons good and bad for CEOs everywhere, the trickle-for now-but-inevitable-flood-soon-enough migration of CA social media tech workers to the productive economy at real market prices for their talents. Each of these deserves its own deep-dive analysis and study, but he’s snapshotted them all and put them in one place, and shown they they are all related.
I do deeply appreciate the way Wolf is able to weave the human elements into the dry data. Very nicely done, as usual.
The “elite” high tech in the west are too contaminated for the high
tech in the mid west.
Indeed.
One of my University of Michigan classmates co-founded a tech company that he and his partners sold to Cisco Systems for, oh, around $25 million. They were golden-handcuffed to Cisco for three years, and then they escaped.
When my friend would travel out to NorCal on business, he took special pleasure in going into public restaurants and coffee shops and eavesdropping on the conversations. It took all he had to keep himself from bursting out laughing. The people were that self-important.
…human ‘self-importance’ knows no geographical delineation in my admittedly-limited experience…
may we all find a better day.
Apparently layoffs, high interest rates, QT and recession are great for stocks and crypto. Just another bear rally I guess.
Arya, just a guess but the market thinks:
– layoffs are small, and a good thing for EPS
– these aren’t high interest rates, just better interest-earning opportunities!
– QT is fine because it’s still tiny per month, and hardly anyone understands it anyway
– recession is now looking to be very shallow
A: They (mostly) lose money and money is now worth 4.5%.
It’s time real people working real jobs to get appreciated. I don’t need apps, I can open webpages in my browser. I don’t need Blockchain, metauniverses, or 5 touchscreens in my vehicle. I need groceries, mechanics, my mail, my garbage collected..
Hahahaha, you posted this comment on this website. Think of what it took in terms of tech to allow you to comment on this site. Nothing to do with “groceries, mechanics, my mail, my garbage collected” but with software, server hardware, fiberoptic infrastructure, all kinds of networking tech, and if you posted this on a smartphone, this list gets much longer. People don’t realize how much of their lives involves tech.
Yeah, the world definitely can function quite well without “tech.” You don’t need a smartphone to live a comfortable life.
Working Class
Yep agree. But its getting harder and harder to get these basic services. Everyone has been brainwashed to think that these apps from big tech are improving their lives, when in many cases they’re being sold a bill of goods. Many firms are just offloading their work, including customer service, onto the customer and payee. Also, they are farming for mailing lists, e-mail addresses to sell to other advertisers.
I have a dozen or so Web sites that I visit from my desktop PC’s at home, and that’s it. No smartphone, just a flip phone that I leave my car for emergencies and for confirmation of appointments.
I agree that easy money turn people’s brain into mush but I would disagree that these people are recovering, especially considering how much hopium still left in the air to work out…I think these people suffer permanent brain damage with decades of QT, even recovered, they will probably be at 50% of rationality during normal period time of investing..when once upon a time there was a normal function market in which not every single action is dependent on what the FED will do, say or did not say…etc
I tentatively agree with much of your post beginning with your first sentence ” easy money turn people’s brain into mush”, I think an Occam’s Razor competitor.
The next observation, ” are recovering, especially considering how much hopium still left in the air to work out” which correlates with my own view. That the current price in the asset markets are being levitated by a mysterious gas, excess liquidity, that creates inflation.
The next segment of your comments:
“I think these people suffer permanent brain damage with decades of QT, even recovered, they will probably be at 50% of rationality during normal period time of investing..”
Shines the magnifying glass on a plethora of controversial subjects starting with permanent brain damage caused by QE, ZIRP.
What is the normal level of rationality that investors normally exhibit. Damn, your right. 50% rationality is a high bar.
Any company that can cut advertising by 50% and not see any drop in revenues is doing a horrible job of marketing.
Jack Welch had years of top performance by cutting the bottom 10% of employees on a rolling basis. I actually would advocate for zero base budgeting, although that is extreme. Only hire people you need, only spend money that can be justified by a rigorous return on capital calculation.
A smart manager can overcome this stupidity by turning over only recent hires while maintaining a stable 80% core. It’s called hire to fire.
That may be true as far as it goes, but that’s not what Wolf said in the report if you’re referring to that. Wolf said companies might not feel the impact on revenues “immediately” if they cut their ad spend by half, but they will see a long-term impact.
Some of the bay area laid off will end up in Frisco, Tx, and insist that locals call it ‘the city’.
The lack of capital due to the baby boomers retiring is also making the ultrarich perpetrate more frauds to get/keep wealth and not just by inflating away their liabilities: e.g., more and more ultrarich employers and their crony insurers get employees to buy employer life insurance plans with additional benefits paid for by employees’ additional contributions but deceive them into filling out online, designed-to-confuse forms on short time deadlines on unreadable, confusing websites, required to be filled suddenly while they are doing regular work assignments, so the employees fail to list all of their various medical conditions.
The insurers can access by authorizations, which the employees signed, all their medical records but claim not to do so. Then, on death, claiming employees’ fraud, the insurer keeps all premium payments, does not pay the additional, $2 million death benefit but only the basic, $20,000 benefit their employer provided, and if sued, move the case to federal court.
The employees believed that their employer was providing a real benefit. The employer gets discounts; the employees get the hole that remains after the elevator left. (Federal courts require unanimous jury verdicts so it is impossible for the employee-plaintiffs to win there, or get relief for all other employees under PAGA, even if they maybe did not understand this — by design.) Wonderful scam! LOL
The market is rallying assuming 25bps in next fed meeting and then pause afterwards.
Fed official also came out supporting this.
The financial conditions are quite loose. If Powell is serious, he’d hike 50 bps.
Let’s see
OK, at two minutes your recitation about the decline in production of America’s widgets, advertising, suggested the potentially dire consequence of layoffs at the tech giants who make their nut on advertising.
Rather than “tech giants” the more accurate description, perhaps, might be “CCIA”, the civilian central intelligence agency.
Your description of the carnage, Musk rampaging through the China shop with narry a scratch, cutting off heads and reniging on contracts.
Time will tell about twitter, a platform that is already obsolete.
It is a rare talent to correctly predict the future when your young, as obviously Musk has done a number of times. Paypal, Tesla, Spacex, Twitter ?
I’m both cursed and blessed by the degree of normalcy that I have experienced. I have won and I have been beat.
I’m sure the courts, payed for by the taxpayers, will sort it all out. In the courts of the wealthy, not guilty is the presumption.
So, the entertainment/novelty businesses that were granted internet assets for free are admitting that their sustainable business model is failing or changing in a way that is more ethical than the predatory commercial monster it has become. Heartless for money.
Such is a grist for conversation that I’m likely to introduce socially, always inappropriately. Because my intended audience hasn’t a clue about what the hell I’m talking about.
The world has spun off a new world in the morning, again.
I would like to acknowledge the passing of David Crosby, an typical artistic genius.
I remember writing in comments here in 2019 we are witnessing the end of civilisation – the computer programme of civilising humans bar a few forest dwellers is now lockstep done.
All that was left was to implement that which had undergone numerous feasibility tests – the satellite strategy of WFH to pass next growth stage digitisation costs back to the farm animals so the farmers are free again to till new lockstep fields of nano feasibility. Except timeline shows AI couldn’t figure out how to breathe or be divine or soul connect as humans do.
Recent news that China population has peaked, it has officially matured with median age of 38 approaching many Western countries was the give away. New programme now folks. Fasten your seat belts! Vote with your roots. Remember to breathe!