Have you noticed that the pace of layoff announcements has gotten rather fast and furious lately? Many of the biggest companies in the entire country are now conducting mass firings, and this is reminding many analysts of what we witnessed back in 2008. During the “Great Recession”, millions of Americans ultimately lost their jobs. Will we see a similar thing happen this time around? Let’s hope not, but right now the signs are not encouraging. The following are 10 major layoff announcements which have all happened within the past 10 days…
#1 Gannett (the owner of USA TODAY)
Gannett, the owner of USA TODAY and local news operations in 45 states, announced Thursday another round of job cuts in the company’s news division after a third-quarter loss and an earlier series of cost-cutting measures.
The company, which plans to cut 6% of its estimated 3,440 staff in the news division, will notify affected employees on Dec. 1 and 2.
#2 Roku
Roku is the latest technology and media player to slash jobs, revealing in a securities filing Thursday that it plans to reduce its workforce by about 5 percent, or about 200 jobs.
#3 CNN
CNN CEO Chris Licht had to speak to employees during a tense company town hall on Tuesday as the network faces layoffs by early December after he was tasked with finding ways to cut costs.
Licht, 51, addressed questions surrounding the cuts after he previously indicated during the summer that CNN would not face any need to fire staff.
#4 Cisco
Cisco Systems Inc.’s stock rose in extended trading Wednesday after the networking-technology company delivered better-than-expected numbers on the top and bottom line, and offered encouraging guidance.
Still, Cisco Chief Financial Officer Scott Herren announced a “limited business restructuring,” to be shared with employees on Thursday, that will right-size its real-estate portfolio and impact about 5% of its 80,000 workers worldwide — or 4,000 people.
Louisville-based employer GE Appliances is planning to lay off 5% of its salaried workforce in coming weeks, the company confirmed to The Courier Journal.
The cost of keeping the company running has risen for several reasons, according to GE Appliances spokesperson Julie Wood, which has caused the business to look into money-saving measures.
#6 Asana
The layoffs in the tech sector just keep piling up.
On Tuesday, project management software provider Asana announced “the difficult decision” to cut its workforce by 9% as part of a broader corporate restructuring program.
Lifestyle media company Outside Media, which houses titles including Backpacker, Ski and Climbing, laid off 12% of its workforce Tuesday, according to a memo sent by founder and CEO Robin Thurston.
#8 Lyft
The layoffs that had been announced last week were confirmed Thursday at local tech company Lyft, raising questions about what the loss of jobs will mean for the wider Bay Area economy.
Ride-hailing app company Lyft confirmed the layoffs to KPIX. Lyft is eliminating 227 jobs.
#9 Twitter
After laying off 50 percent of the company’s employees, Elon Musk has turned his attention to Twitter’s contract workers. According to separate reports from Platformer’s Casey Newton and Axios, the social media platform began reducing its contingent staff on Saturday afternoon. After a period of uncertainty about the scale of the job cuts, Newton put the number at approximately 4,400 affected individuals.
#10 Amazon
Amazon workers were left in chaos after they learned they were the first of the expected 10,000 to be laid off in a 15-minute meeting with executives.
News of the coming layoffs broke on Monday, with employees getting a calendar invitation to the quick, scripted meeting with executives on Tuesday, specifically members of the Alexa voice assistant division.
In that list I didn’t even mention the layoffs at Facebook which could end up being the biggest of them all.
Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg. If the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates, what we will see in 2023 and beyond is likely to be far worse.
The U.S. economy is already slowing down dramatically, but the Fed seems determined to hike interest rates even higher.
They are committing economic malpractice right in front of our eyes, and what they are doing is going to severely hurt countless numbers of our fellow citizens.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “End Times” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written six other books that are available on Amazon.com including “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending copies as gifts to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.
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Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
