Just to put the current crisis in perspective.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows the 84 percent decline in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index from its high in February 2007. It retreated as subprime-mortgage defaults sparked a worldwide credit freeze that saddled banks including Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. with $1.2 trillion of losses.The S&P 500 Information Technology Index tumbled 83 percent from its peak in March 2000 to its trough in October 2002 as investors concluded prices that had climbed eightfold in five years weren’t supported by profits at companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc.
“A crash in financials is much more pervasive than a crash in technology, because the financial services industry greases the wheels of commerce,” said Diane Garnick, who helps oversee $354 billion as an investment strategist at Invesco Ltd. in New York. The banking crisis “is going to take much longer to come out of than the technology bust,” she said.
The difference between the two crisis is a matter of size. The Dot-Com bust was a molehill compared to the mountain we have today.
dot con - silicon valley employment
the total amount of people forced out of their careers in Silicon valley during the dot con bust was over 50%.
Now the projections for unemployment are worse than the dot con mass exodus.
The thing about the dot con bomb is many corporations used it as an excuse to offshore outsource as fast as they could entire divisions of technical work that was previously done by U.S. workers.
So, I expect further use of this as an excuse to do the same thing.
One of the worst, who is gunning for Stimulus contracts, is IBM. It's astounding how they have destroyed this company in record time. It used to be lifetime employment and sure they had dead wood, but now they are churning their staff so badly....their overall product is suffering.
Their new corporate logo should read: IBM: India or Bust