08/27/09 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Many of the recent job losses are permanent. They’re structural. It’s not just the good old days, when the company said, ‘Go home and we’ll call you back in a few months.’ No, in many cases, the jobs are gone forever.
It’s not just factory jobs, either. Those jobs were the first to go. The U.S. economy lost millions of its old-line factory jobs over the past 25 years or so. It brought us into the age of the Rust Belt. Some economists and deep thinkers bragged about how this was somehow ‘good’ for America. (Call me old-fashioned, but I could never quite figure that out.)
Now people with white collars are getting hit with permanent job losses in sectors like banking and law. Many parts of the nation’s financial districts are the new Rust Belts of America.
There are former lawyers waiting on tables, stealing jobs from the traditional class of table servers, starving artists. At many silk-stocking firms, even the formerly sacrosanct legal “billable hour” is under attack. And I know doctors and architects who’ve been laid off.
So joblessness is up, and it’s not about to come down anytime soon.
Byron King
Byron King is the managing editor of Outstanding Investments and Energy & Scarcity Investor. He is a Harvard-trained geologist who has traveled to every U.S. state and territory and six of the seven continents. He has conducted site visits to mineral deposits in 26 countries and deep-water oil fields in five oceans. This provides him with a unique perspective on the myriad of investment opportunities in energy and mineral exploration. He has been interviewed by dozens of major print and broadcast media outlets including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, MSN Money, MarketWatch, Fox Business News, and PBS Newshour.
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Is this some action you see and intend to get a piece of? Really, try a more dedicated approach to analysis.
the analysis was quite good and accurate….paul craig roberts has done yeoman’s work on this subject over the past 25 years and has warned long and hard about this predicament….
it ain’t coming back honey…
Right on about law. Read my blog
bigdebtsmalllaw.wordpress.com
This started in earnest in the ’91 recession. Up until then the engineers & programmers had job security. Then even they were being laid off. Whole divisions let go. My brother got laid off at 51 and never really worked again. He had the world by the tail up until then.