Halliburton To Slash 5,000 More Jobs; Job Watch -- Random Op-Ed From The Wall Street Journal -- February 26, 2016

Halliburton to cut 5,000 more jobs. Flashback: GE looks to buy some of HAL's drilling assets.

Kohl's is closing stores as the department store industry collapses. 

I track the weekly jobs reports here.

Last week The Wall Street Journal had an op-ed on "the Sanders appeal."

The title of the op-ed and subject: The Young and the Economically Clueless. Millennials are flocking to Sanders, and in the GOP they favor Trump. Why are young people voting against their own interests?

From the article:

These young voters seem not to realize that the economic policies they find so resonant are the least likely to promote the growth and the social mobility they desire. They deserve to be lead from the discredited backwater of equalizing outcomes, forward with policies that instead help eliminate barriers frustrating their access to opportunities.

The millennials can’t be faulted for being anxious about their economic prospects. They are coming of age in the weakest economy in generations. The underemployment rate (measuring those working a job for which they’re overqualified and underpaid) for young adults below age 30 is 60%. The overall employment-to-population ratio of 77.4% for those in the prime-of-working-life 25-54 age bracket translates into 1.5 million jobs below the 20-year average.

The college graduate living in his parents’ basement and working a marginal job to service a student loan is by now an archetype of the Obama era. And while the headline unemployment numbers are down, and the administration congratulates itself on a tepid “recovery” that was almost exclusively dependent on Fed-engineered financial-asset inflation, there is every reason to be skeptical about the health of the labor market. The labor-participation rate languishes at its lowest level in 40 years, and credit creation, government and private investment aren’t faring much better.

Headwinds for the millennials:

Artificial intelligence and self-learning algorithms are efficiency-creating and cost-reducing, and soon they will be displacing service professionals and Ph.Ds just as they have factory workers. The Bank of England projects that 45% of jobs done by people in the U.K. will eventually be performed by robots. ArkInvest expects the U.S. to shed 75 million jobs in the next two decades.  

For me, reading the Ayn Rand biography helped me understand the history of all this. It is interesting to see that we may end up re-living that history.