Following immediately on Facebook’s laying off 11,000 employees and Google and Microsoft announcements of about 7,000 between them, Amazon has begun a continuing series of layoffs which will go on through 2023, announced in a memo Nov. 17 from CEO Andy Jassy, which was titled, “A Note about Role Eliminations.” No number was given in that memo; the New York Times in a Nov. 17 story estimated 10,000 Amazon layoffs to begin with, in retail and human resources. This would be less than 1% of its workforce to start, but it is to continue. These developments come alongside 35,000 layoffs by about 20 different “tech” companies in the first half of November alone. The jobs lost are international, but heavily concentrated in the United States.
In perhaps a bigger “digital downslide” event, Softbank, the once $350-billion-asset Tokyo-based “tech bank,” reported a $10 billion third-quarter loss, and its CEO Masayoshi Son resigned, to manage a U.K. fund Softbank owns. He had been said to be “worth” $13.6 billion, but it is now revealed that he has debts to Softbank itself in the range of $5 billion.
What connects these developments to the implosion of the FTX fraud, is that the major central banks’ increases of interest rates, forcing most other central banks to follow, is sucking credit and liquidity out of the years-long Everything Bubble, which the same central banks blew up, and the sudden contractions are starting in the bubble’s most extremely over-leveraged sections.
