Hey everyone. I have a few friends who were recently laid off from a pharmaceutical company due to an acquisition. They join the millions of Americans who are out of work during these tough times. So I felt compelled to initiate this kind of discussion.

 

Unfortunately, I'm not educated a whole lot regarding the US economic system. All the economy-related threads on this forum just leave me with a question mark. I do know that Wall Street had a big meltdown last year with the financial collapse of a bunch of banks. And these banks fell because people couldn't pay their mortgages. As a result of these banks failing, companies can't get the funds to support their businesses. And this was followed by a massive rash of layoffs. And unemployed people can't afford to spend, so retail outlets like Circuit City met their demise.

 

I also understand that companies tend to participate in such activities as merging, downsizing, and "offshoring."

 

However, that's all I know.

 

But everything can be traced to a beginning. A trend in job losses doesn't just happen. One thing leads to another. There are cause-and-effect relationships obviously at work.

 

Can someone piece all of this together? How do banks, government, and business practices figure into the equation? What are the origins of this rolling snowball of job losses in the first place? Where did it all start to go wrong? Is there a timeline?

 

Thanks for your help, guys. I apologize if I seem so ignorant.

If you have a question about job offshoring or don't like it, make a thread about it and be up-front. You asked a very complex question and then answered yourself by linking 7 obscure articles all on the evils of offshoring jobs. Makes it look like you really didn't want an answer to your original question.

 

You're a relatively new poster so I'm giving you some advice.

I apologize for the mistake. I didn't know.

 

I would like to hear other people's opinions on this topic, though.

Outsourcing is an effect, not a cause. Jobs would not move overseas if it were not so expensive to employ people here. And that expense is not in wages, because the savings of going overseas are not less than what an employee makes, they are just less than an employer's total cost to employ an American resident.