I'll be here.

 

Going back and re-reading the JLR decision to layoff 20,000 of 41,000 and reduce 'executive leadership' pay by a whole virtue signalling 10%... do you read that the same as me that no upper management positions have been reduced by the workforce reduction???

Frankly, that kind of narcissism is disgraceful. How do they justify spending roughly twice as much on mgt as a percentage of payroll?

 

I'm not a board member or a shareholder, so I don't care that much. Produce a car I like at a price I'm willing to pay or don't. If not them, then someone else will.
I also don't profess to know enough about macroeconomics to assume I could make better decision than those in the position to do so. What I do know is that information is never fully accurate and rarely written without an agenda. Grains of salt. I like them one at a time.

 

On one hand its symbolic of an untennable modern narcissism that fires the worker first for collosal management failures, but on both hands its bad business to double mgt expenditures while the company is failing just to keep your friends paid. When goose that lays the golden eggs becomes dinner, its a tacit admission that its over.

 

Now if only I could get my interest to compound exponentially like your metaphors do....

 

SKF

 

If you have a goose that lays golden eggs, do you feed it on carats?

 

Absolute insanity... Management should resign en mass. Are you f'"n crazy, this is what is wrong with our country/world. Something happens and heads at the top MUST roll. B.S. It takes alot to climb the ladder, nobody is going to jump off so they are politically correct in your mind. Spoken by someone I presume has never had to climb the ladder. Just bitch about the ladder from the pits. This (me) somebody who has chosen to climb the ladder more than once feels like you don't have a clue. This is not a personal attack, I see this everywhere, it's catchy. It's a pandemic way of thinking. Geeeeze.
Rant over... you may return to your regularly scheduled programing.

 

They laid off half the company 3 weeks into a downturn. Thats a weak cash flow business, a financial, not a car company. No rainy day fund whatsoever, and now, no executive punishment or accountability. Disgraceful mismanagement is an understatement.

 

You are blaming them for following industry's best practices. Aside from Apple's cash hoard, no company has "rainy day fund". They have insurance.

The fault here is systemic - markets are allowed to externalize risks. I assume in society like UK these laid off employees would get unemployment benefits, paid for in advance by taxes. If these benefits are not sufficient or not funded, then corporate taxes should go up to pay for them.

I don't think it is reasonable to ask businesses to pay for labor that does not produce. This would result in cars that are not cost-competitive with other manufacturers.

 

Clearly they don't have a plan, piggybank or insurance, when their opening move is to drop a meat cleaver on half the workforce. But no executives.

I agree with you JLR is no different than other coporations sidling-up to the moral hazard that comes with the expectation of infallible external government help. In this case that external "help" also reset their business priorities. That is obviously a key risk when mgt abdicates major risk mitigation responsibility to self-interested politicians who do not understand the first thing about their business.

So we are saying the same thing: everybody did it. But the buck still stops with "leadership." They chose to bow down to the distorted whims of external government bureaucrats' weekly powerpoint slides.

When half your company evaporates in three weeks, you have to fire the C-Suite plus most executives. How can you justify high salaries without any accountibility for a manifestation of catastrophic risk? So they either get the axe, or they get paid the same as the workers they let go.

 

I think you need to have a read of this because you clearly don't understand the difference:

https://www.dictionary.com/e/furlough-vs-layoff/

The staff are still employed by Jaguar, they have just taken advantage of an offer from the UK government to pay a proportion of the workers wages whilst they are unable to work due to partial factory shut down.

As soon as work picks up they will be back again.

If work does not pick up then they may lay people off but they haven't done that at the moment.

 

Well one thing is guaranteed, supply and demand for the oldest profession will never be depleted.....
The currency might be toilet paper or Krugerrand’s but throughout history that business model has never failed

 

No pay = fired. Euphemisms don't pay the bills.

 

Yup, and as I have pointed out they are currently being paid. The UK government are paying 80% of their wage and Jaguar are topping it up to 100%.

 

JLR execs may have dropped the ball on disaster preparedness. However, if you fire them now what about business continuity? I think what you are suggesting will compound the problem.

Also, unlike third-world countries, UK and Canada have healthy unemployment systems - laid off workers will get compensated by unemployment insurance. On top of that, at least in Canada, there is COVID top-off. There is also mandatory severance if termination is permanent.

 

If you are like us, or more appropriately, if we are like you, its the BoE or the Federal Reserve whobis loaning them "money" as a bridge loan.

I've been studying and trading government-architected disasters for decades. The central bank is not the govt, they are granted monopoloy status by the govt, but they are 100% for-profit predators operating only within the law of the jungle.

So just a note of caution, these bridge loans in times of accute stress are better labeled hostile take-unders. Its the way the bank hooks your assets, pulls you under, then seizes your company as collateral due. Thats what always happens.

So I would ask, for how long will the central bank loan liquidity to pay mounting bills with debt piled on debt. But the answer is, as long as it takes to seize everything of value, then collect full repayment via the treasury's taxpayer loan guaranty.

What do you call a "lender of last resort" in the real world? A loan shark. These "catastrophes" are not accidents, they are crime scenes.

Anyone who thinks pandemic-blamed depressions are new, have a look at the 65,000 US death 1929 pandemic that "forced" the govt to shut down the ecomony for months, plus quarantine and burn the entire Florida farm harvest to halt a Mediterranean Fruit Fly panic, touching off a state-wide bank collapse that spread nationwide. Today, we have a Texas oil fracking bank collapse on top of the pandemic. Same cast of criminals.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1555806/

1929 Fruit Fly Quarantine and Florida crop burning

 

You need to do a bit more studying then because these are not bridging loans. The UK goverment is paying 80% of the wages and isn't expecting to get the money paid back. They would rather do that for a few months to keep jobs open for people than have mass unemployment.

Both my son and wife's employers have taken advantage of a similar scheme here in New Zealand. Without it they would most likely be unemployed now and that may still happen but as we have only had 1 death and 2 new covid cases in the last three days our economy can now be allowed to restart.

 

We have something similar in Australia. If our turnover is down 30% on the same month last year (to qualify which is a once off) we get $750 per week per employee until the end of September. This is not refundable. Nor are various other stimuli and incentives. It is saving a lot of jobs, apparently 750,000 businesses have registered for it.

 

And there are similar programmes in Canada...clearly the US is out of step regarding this pandemic - in many ways.