laid off for Christmas

Count me as one of the 80,000 unlucky stiffs and a computer engineer/software developer. I got laid off at the start of December and applied all over the place with very few responses, all negative. It's a bad time to be out of work because: 1) there's all the holidays messing with the schedules of recruiters and hiring managers, and 2) new hires add on to the depleted yearly budget-- better to wait a month and push them onto next year's total. Since the new year, things have been looking brighter, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping I'll find something good. It's ugly out there.

seasonal

I guess they thought the economy was so bad that there would not be seasonal layoffs from companies running skeletal crews which is aparently not the case. As in seasonal I mean landscapers and construction related. It around december when especially the construction industry in any states where there is frost or subfreezing temp usually slows down a lot putting many onto unemployment for usually around 2 months. These people usually take jobs at this time in various other fields including taking service related or factory jobs till the weather warms and their employers give them a call.

I imagine the amount of people not getting a job during the layoff period was the surprising thing since there are not a lot of them out there to begin with and many great workers still sitting around waiting for warmer weather.

I believe the stock market is rising in value

because of inflation, not because of real value added. So it looks good on the press releases, but doesn't mean diddly to the stiff looking for a job. I'm one of the lucky ones who got hired for an IT position at the beginning of January. Temp to perm on for a contracting agency, should be a perm in three months.

At best the economy will remain stagnant for the rest of the year. Taxes are going up so industry investment will go down. Furthermore, I've been reading a bit from banking insiders the last couple of days. While the official numbers on foreclosures are holding steady, they aren't real. The US foreclosure process is a long one, and in normal times it takes about 9 months for a bank to process one. So again, in normal times they pretty much start the clock on them as soon as possible because of the lag time. But with the bottom falling out of the home market, the banks have stopped doing that. Which means that when the economy does start to pickup, they are going to either keep the foreclosure pipe where it is, or open it bigger to try to flush out their non-performing loans. Not pretty no matter how you look at it.