Yep. they're all circling the wagons then riding off with all the provisions and money leaving the peasants to fend for themselves. All those yachts. So little time left. Fuck corporate fascism.
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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indeed
However, Deutsche Bank’s shares were up nearly 4% in morning trading, as it gave a stronger outlook for revenues.
Number go up though.
A far fetched hypothesis - shareholders of companies with large amounts of bullshit jobs figure out that they can cut a lot of them without anything materially changing in the businesses. Number go up and up. Unemployment go up and up with significant impact on the economies because those are well paying bullshit jobs. Aggregate demand falls. Companies drop their sales expectations, profits. Recessionary feedback loop continues.
That's exactly what's happening. Companies overhire during good times to give the impression of growth to shareholders and investors. Then when times get hard they start trimming all those jobs so the people at the top can keep raking in profit.
Yeah but the novelty I'm suggesting is the realization that many of those positions were never doing anything useful. Cue David Graeber's bullshit jobs hypothesis. Under the opposite assumption - that most jobs are doing something useful - layoffs aren't a very positive occurrence. Letting useful people go means the corp has reduced output, which means lower profit (ceteris paribus). It might be viewed somewhat positively if the output is already lower and the corp reduces labor to match, but overall expected profits are still lower so number can't go up a lot. If however we work under Graeber's assumption that there is a significant number of bullshit jobs, e.g. 30%, and we assume that a corp lays off people only from that pool, then we wouldn't expect its output and profits to decrease as a result of the layoffs. Instead we'd expect just costs decrease and net profits increase. Then the number can go up unimpeded. And if the 30% proportion is anywhere close to reality then under this paradigm there could be a lot of layoffs to be had and a lot of room for number to go up. What I'm suggesting goes beyond the typical business cycle contraction driven layoffs. And so I'm suggesting it could have more significant negative externalities than the traditional contraction-driven layoffs.
Yeah I very much agree with the bullshit jobs idea. That's what I meant when I was saying are being hired to show growth as opposed to because there's legitimate work to be done. One of the biggest examples of this was actually when Musk bought Twitter and got rid of over 80% of the staff. People thought that Twitter would implode and so on, but in reality 80% of Twitter turned out to be bullshit jobs.
The mechanic here is that a lot of companies are no longer running on a traditional business model where they make a product that they sell to customers. Instead, companies often run on VC funding, and they have to show growth to keep getting money. Hence building a Potemkin village is the strategies most companies take. It's also worth noting that VCs aren't dumb either. They're also running a pyramid scheme. They know full well that the companies they fund aren't profitable, but they just cash out at the IPO when the shares hit their peak.
To sum up, much of US economy is effectively a scam now.
Ah, got it.
BTW I don't have much objection to bullshit jobs. They serve as a welfare system which given the lack of a universal alternative is better than unemployment with no income. Somewhat related to the guaranteed job program described by some MMT folks.
I do have an issue with the idea of forcing people to spend their time doing meaningless tasks just so they can exist. The fact that we have a lot of bullshit jobs is an indication the capitalism is a fundamentally broken system that's holding humanity back.
Yet neolibs claim capitalism is super sustainable... But these mega layoffs keep coming, oversaturating the growing numbers of unemployed.
That's a feature all of itself since layoffs build up the reserve army of labour. Once you get a lot of desperate unemployed people, you can start offering worse employment conditions.