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Economy

“Regressive Terminations”: UK May Fire 300,000

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The UK government could fire 300,000 people and the number may rise to 700,000, according to the Times of London. The nation has an estimated £156 billion budget deficit. Governments in Greece, Spain, and Portugal are taking similar measures by lowering government worker salaries and starting layoffs.

The trouble with the massive cuts in all four nations is the extent to which they are regression. UK GDP was up only .2% in the first quarter of 2010 ,meaning it would take very little to tip the nation into a second recession. The 300,000 laid-off workers will have to receive some level of support from the government, which will expand the cost side of the budget. The unemployed will certainly cut into the UK’s tax and consumer base. Those factors would almost argue for keeping the workers employed.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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