More jobs being lost

[redrob]

5000 jobs are going to be lost this year in East Lancashire (posted by the telegraph in Lancashire) but I am sure that many more jobs are going to be lost in Lancashire and the rest of England when is the credit crunch going to end and are these job losses affecting your business.

 

[leemason]

And all this Government does it wait money that we haven't got bailing out Banks and making stupid cuts in VAT.

 

[Sphinx]

Its the propaganda that feeds the situation. Pleeeese dont believe everything you read because its so exagerated. House prices are still worth AT LEAST what they were 2-3 years ago.

That is hardly any time at all. Really.

Enough said.

 

[Esk247]

same view here about the house prices...i read in the papers and see on the news that 'DOOM AND DESTRUCTION, HOUSE PRICES COLLAPSE BY 38%..ITS THE END OF THE HOUSING BOOM...MAN LOSES 400,000 IN ONE NIGHT' but when you flick through to the houses for sale section...1 bedroom flat, in need of revamp, £175,0000 << i think not!...parents paid £48,000 for their house in 1998 so 11 years later prices still far too high.

 

[Sphinx]

My parents payed about 19,000 in 1988. They sold it for over 250,000 in 2007. Im certainly not going to dry their eyes with a kleenex.

 

[The undercover exec]

There are plenty of high profile job losses and I don't think the effect of that has fed through yet. I work in a FTSE100 company with a big UK presence and it is marginally slower than last year, we'd expect to be growing almost as a matter of course. My feeling is taht there is more to come however many many businesses will survive and some will prosper. Hope its you

 

[redrob]

More bad news I was watching the TV this morning on BBC 1 News they stated that they could be up to 2 million or even 3 million jobs being lost.

 

[AdamJ]

I used to listen to the Today programme each morning but for the last few weeks I've been thoroughly sick of doom and gloom about the economy that I've given up on it for a while. Endless witterings about 3 million unemployed, X bank to collapse, its the worst recession since we invented the word recession, etc. etc. It gets to the point where it seeps into your head that everything is fast going down the toilet, wheather you are actually seeing that or not.

At the end of the day, all you can do is get your head down and work on your own business and make it work if you can.

 

[debbidoo]

More bad news I was watching the TV this morning on BBC 1 News they stated that they could be up to 2 million or even 3 million jobs being lost.

That's not in addition to current unemployment levels - it includes them. We're almost at 2m already so reaching 2m is not a huge difference.

We had 4m unemployed when Thatcher was in power.

 

[darrenwis]

I'm just one of many that the credit crunch has hit badly and I've been made redundant!

I'd love to start up my own business but as of yet I am still to find that niche!

It's just so frustrating.

 

[KidsBeeHappy]

A media blackout would see this recession over a lot quicker! Problem is that media grabs at soundbites, doesn't explain them, turns them into headlines, and exagerates the problem

Why are the bank losses so high - because they've had to make MASSIVE provisions for the pension funds to comply with accounting regulations (or the auditors don't sign off, and that's even worse). So the stock market lost 1/3 of it's value, so any company with a pension fund, partic like the banks etc where there are a lot of final salary/defined benefit type schemes have to make immediate massive provision for the entire stock market fall.

So the media run stories about loss, the stock market falls further - and there is absolutely no new underlying real factor that has suddenly materialised. The stock market will already have the pension fund provisions incorporated into the current share prices. But media attention makes it all sound new, and unexpected.

Will that provision ever materialise as a "loss", probably not, because not all of the RBS employees will start taking a pension tomorrow, and the stock market will over the next couple of years recover. And these provisions will be written back through the accounts over the next few years, and then the media will slam them for "immoral profits".

There you go - complete common sense!
This world frustrates me.

 

[leemason]

This is not simply a crisis manufactured by the media. Pensions and the future provision for them may well be part of a long term problem for large companies thanks to this Governments mismanagement of that sector but it is not the whole story by a long way. There are major problems in the way that the whole banking sector has been run over the past few years. The banks have made (or at least decrlared) massive profits over the last few years, each year being an all time record over previous years. There have been a number of smaller financial "scandals" and mis-selling issues over the past 10 or more years - this latest one just completes the picture of corrupt management and greedy money men (and women).

The media are undoubtedly very lazy and if there is a big story they all jump on the back of it and rarely dig into it to find out what the real issues are. This happened on the way up and is happening on the way down. The media definately played a part in making the boom bigger and even less sustainable and they will do the same with the bust! But that's life in a modern media oriented society.

 

[KidsBeeHappy]

Accounting regulations do play a part here. In the past companies could revalue periodically, however current guidance is to recognise all potential losses immiately, whether they are likely to be realised or not.

And conversely the same thing happenend on the way up. Rapidly increasing property values resulted in balance sheet assets being revalued annually, and unrealised property gains being included in those "massive" profits.

Is the man in the street aware of how accounting regulations make companies recognise unrealised profits and losses in their accounts in this way - no. Never included in the media analysis, even rarely uttered in the FT, because the people in the know know about them.

Does anyone talk about the "above the line/below the line" distinction?

Concentrated attention on the final profit or loss number, without understanding what's been included to get there, is good neither for our society, the media, the companies, and indeed the accounting regulatory bodies themselves.

Times of Boom and Bust are when the accounting regulatory bodies and the SEC usually pull their fingers out and re-consider if what they are requiring companies to disclose is acutally what is required by the users themselves, and to use those immortal accounting words "true & fair". At the moment, i would consider that accounting regulations are only acting in favour of the very very tiny minority that actually understand them all and their implications completely.

 

[leemason]

Totally agree about the accountancy regulations playing a part. Also the ways in which auditors work had have a hugh influence as in the case of Enron.

 

[KidsBeeHappy]

Where they didn't work

 

[peterjhale]

We had 4m unemployed when Thatcher was in power.

It was just slightly over 3m in 1986

 

[leemason]

It was just slightly over 3m in 1986

Depends which figures you believe! The Conservative Government put a lot of effort into massaging them...