Meta lays off 11,000 people

Ya, Instagram is quite popular among the younger generation, actually!

It really depends on the Fed and the overall market. I would say the economy is at a much greater risk now than in 2000, for these reasons:

We have several fundamental inflation factors - The population is aging. A huge number of boomers are exiting the workforce every year. - Unlike in Japan, this cohort of people are likely to keep spending into their retirement, including a huge spending on healthcare. - This time, we don't have China to absorb the inflation. China is in the same situation. Also, most jobs that could be easily exported already have been. With the tech sector being a bit of an exception. - The prices for all sorts of jobs being done by people in their 60's will go up. This goes for everything from hairdressers and plumbers to accountants and lawyers. This will cause pressure on the salaries for these jobs, raising costs. - Decades of low interest rates have created a massive amount of cash (and cash-equivalent "value") in the system. As investments go down, more will find its way to consumption, driving prices up. - During the Covid lockdowns, many countries discovered that plenty of goods were becoming scarce or unavailable. Local production facilities are being built for anything from face masks and respirators to integrated circuits both in the US and Europe. Trade barriers and subsidies are used to support this. Local production will be more expensive than 1-2 huge plants able to serve the globe. - Covid also led to a mentality change, where employee loyalty to employers took a big hit. Employees (especially blue collared ones that can't WFH) that got laid off during Covid will be more likely to switch jobs more often, driving salaries and costs up.

On top of this, the war in Ukraine adds these factors: - Food, energy and fuel, as well as many minerals are scarce, driving up the prices of everything. - Such items are added to the list of goods western countries want to produce for themselves. And in the case of food, places that experience famine may switch back to food production over cash crops over a longer term, as well. - Western countries have started rebuilding their arms industries, sucking capital and labor from other sectors.

All-in-all, these factors lay the foundations for an inflationary pressure that could exceed the 1970's.

As central banks attempt to counter this by continuing to raise rates, we get the following problems. - Anyone with a variable or expiring interest rate will have their standard of living going down from interest payments AND inflation. - Huge swaths of people will demand that raises keep up with inflation. Groups with skills that see increased demand will get such raises, and possibly more. - In other sectors, employers will not have the income to raise compensation at the same rate. Employees in these sectors will become increasingly unhappy. - People will start unionizing at a greater rate than before. Especially in Europe, but also in the US. - Most likely, we will see large numbers of massive labor market conflicts, with strikes followed by lock-outs. - Tensions between countries is also likely to rise (though the war in Ukraine may mitigate that a bit, for as long as it lasts) - These conflicts will damage the supply side of the economy further, leading to even more inflation and a deeper stagflation, in a vicious circle.

In all of this, this is bad for any business without a significant positive cash flow, including much of internet "tech". Military "tech", on the other hand, may see a huge boom, and the same may come for anyone able to contribute within manufacturing or construction (such as through robotics/AI).

Isn’t part of shorting also predicting when the drop will happen?

I laughed so hard at this comment, thank you for a little bit of humor in these ominous times.

Its kinda true though. He's been the poster "white night entrepreneur", egged on by every other nerd who still believes in the exceptional founder myth. That myth motivates a ton of folks to give up their lives and time to try and build something on pretty bleak terms.

For those wondering what "accountability" and "responsibility" should look like:

They do not need to mean punishment, they can just mean "clear, concrete intent for remediation and improvement".

The remediation part is implemented by the severance package. The intent for improvement, is nowhere to be seen.

When somebody makes a mistake, punishing on its own is meaningless. The point is to remedy the mistake (eg pay money if the mistake incurred a financial loss) and prevent further future mistakes. No, the CEO should not resign, they should just identify why things went SO wrong and show a clear plan on how to prevent such mistakes from the future.

If someone deletes a database, I don't expect them to resign, I expect them to restore it from a backup, and find a way to prevent such mistakes from the future (eg run migrations in a reversible transaction)