To add insult to already shrinking bankster-profit injury, HSBC has announced it will slash 10,000 jobs, eliminating over 4 percent of its workforce. This follows the 60,000 layoffs this year by Deutsche Bank, Barclays, Citigroup, and others.
The next decade looks grim for all banking staff in the branches, call centers, and corporate headquarters.
In addition to positions being dropped in the name of “redundancy,” analysts say advances in automation, such as chatbots, will cause an estimated 200,000 lost jobs over the next ten years, the biggest reduction of jobs in banking history.
TRENDPOST: As we go to press, Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, announced QE4, but he wouldn’t call a spade a spade. “This is not QE. In no sense is this QE,” he said, referring to the Fed’s pumping in more cheap money in the troubled overnight lending markets.
Some two weeks ago, when the repo markets were short of cash and interest rates spiked from around 2 percent to 10 percent, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said they would keep the money flowing until 10 October.
Then, last week, when the overnight money junkies needed more monetary methadone, the NY Fed said they would keep the fix going utill November, as we reported in the 1 October issue of the Trends Journal.
Zero Hedge, a “markets-focused” blog, claims the real reason the Fed is injecting more money into the system is because “the US [is] facing an avalanche of debt issuance and with China and Japan barely able to keep up, someone has to buy this debt. That someone: the Fed.”
The Feds action and central banks money-pumping schemes will not save failing economic systems.
As we noted, since they launched QE and zero interest-rate policy following the Panic of ‘08, the data proves they only enriched the One Percent at the expense of the workers of Slavelandia.
On 7 October, the Bank of International Settlements confirmed our analysis, writing that “the unprecedented growth in central banks’ balance sheets since the financial crisis has had a negative impact on the way in which financial markets function.”
TREND FORECAST: The more cheap money backed by nothing and printed on nothing that flows into the systems, the higher gold prices will spike.
While our long-stated forecast was for gold to steadily rise to $2,000 per ounce this year and early next year, considering these new rounds of aggressive monetary stimulus measures being taken by governments and central banks globally, a range of $3,000 to $5,000 per ounce is on the horizon.