CHESSNOID

Wow, what a big announcement by multiple companies.  They all announced layoffs to counter the effects of the recession and stay afloat. NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com)

The final week of January began with a bloodbath for the job market, as over 71,400 more cuts were announced on Monday alone.

At least six companies from manufacturing and service industries announced cost-cutting initiatives that included slashing thousands of jobs.

More than 200,000 job cuts have been announced so far this year, according to company reports. Nearly 2.6 million jobs were lost over 2008, the highest yearly job-loss total since 1945.

That is a ton of jobs and chances are the rate of layoffs will actually increase as we progress into the year. We are currently tracking for a conservative 2.4 million jobs this year.  Considering we loss 2.6 millions jobs last year and the economy will become worse this year, the number of jobs lost will surpass that number.

Many economists think the recession will end after the 2nd quarter of in about 5 months.  CNN.Money:

Brusca said he agreed with many economists’ predictions that the recession will end after the second quarter of 2009. Americans might feel the job market start to bounce back a bit sooner than expected, he said.

“These recessions are like geometry,” Brusca said. “It looks like we’ll have a V-shaped cycle, in that we’re going into this with very sharp losses. This intense-phase recession will probably recover fairly quickly, with the job market coming out it at the same angle it came in.”

Again, I disagree with the experts and don’t think their line of reasoning makes any sense. The loss of jobs will contribute to the recession becoming more severe. The extra government spending on the horizon will extend the length of this recession.

I believe the average recession lasts for about 16 months and it became official that this one began in December of 2007 by those same experts who denied we were in a recession for the entire year of 2008. It looks like they are just gauging the recession period based on the average number of months.

Another consideration is the housing market continues to worsen. Foreclosures are still increasing in inventory that it is hurting the sales of houses that aren’t bank owned. This severe recession will continue until the housing market bottoms out. The record unemployment (layoffs) and record foreclosures threaten to change this recession into a depression.