HSBC has announced it will close hundreds of US branches and lay off over 6,000 in an effort to cut costs and reduce it’s exposure to the US mortgage market. The financial firm will shutter all of it’s HFC and Beneficial bank branches that specialize in consumer and mortgage lending. As of Monday, the branches will no longer be making loans, and employees are beginning to receive notice of layoffs.
The closures will not affect existing loans and loans will continue to be made at HSBC locations.
California’s budget has an $11.2 billion hole in it still for the fiscal year ending in June, with a huge $42 billion hole through the end of next fiscal year ending in June 2010. As a measure to save $750 million.
Not surprising news really (see previous post), Universal Orlando is cutting 70 positions following a down turn in it’s park operations in Orlando.
Disney has announced it is offering buyouts to 600 of it’s managers nationwide in an effort to cut costs at it’s various parks following the worldwide recession. If enough managers don’t accept the deal, layoffs will begin to thin the herd. I’m surprised it took this long for the theme park operator to make cuts even though this division out performed the rest of the company in it’s latest quarterly report.
Morgan Stanley announced it plans to cut 1,880 jobs, or about 3-4% of it’s workforce. No cuts would come from it’s financial advisor network. The cuts will come mostly from back office jobs, which mostly includes those that processed trades.
NEC, the electronics giant based in Tokyo, is set to cut 20,000 workers worldwide to stem losses during the economic downturn. The cuts amount to about 7% of it’s total workforce and will be completed by 2010. Half of the cuts will be from permenant workers, the balance will be from contractors.
Hitachi also announced it will cut 7,000 employees out of it’s nearly 400,000 strong workforce.
Silverton Marine Corp has announced it will be laying off 202 employees by the end of March. The company, based in Millville, NJ, has notified the NJ Department of Labor about the layoffs in late December. Silverton has been in business for 40 years and has locations in Maryland and Florida as well as it’s headquarters in New Jersey. The layoffs amount to just under half of it’s work force. In the letter to employees, President Richard Cerami Jr, stated the company hadn’t shipped any boats to dealers for the previous two months.
The company has stated it hadn’t anticpated the economic downtown would be this dramatic but is now anticipating a non existant market for the near term.
Macy’s today said they will be cutting 7,000 positions or about 4% of their workforce. 5,100 positions will be cut from stores while the balance will be from regional offices around the country. The company also announced they will be centralizing operations instead of operating regionally. Macy’s hopes to save about $400 million a year beginning in 2010. Merit raises for executives have been frozen and reduce 401K match contributions beginning in 2009. Dividend payouts will be reduced 62%.
Potential cuts to it’s executives including less merchandise discounts, company cars, company paid life insurance and financial counseling
If any one city or state would be hard hit by wall street’s woes, it would be New York City. Look at it this way, all the money those wall street employees make, is taxed by the city and state of New York. With all the declining profits and other problems on Wall Street, there is less income, therefore less taxes being collected.
Now to the main story. New York City is facing a massive $4 billion shortfall in it’s current budget, and expects it to be worse next fiscal year. Steps being looked at to close the gap include layoffs in the 10’s of thousands range and an increased sales tax. Either way, it doesn’t look good for the big apple.
Kodak said last week it lost $137 million in the 4th quarter of last year and plans to eliminate 3,500 to 4,500 positions. For the whole year, the company earned $339 million.
Kodak has been struggling to reinvent itself after the digital camera market took off.
