It's just the year % 8 == 0 alarm going off.

What problem are you talking about? The fact that a large company that makes a majority of its revenue from a declining market is cutting its workforce is not indicative of anything at a macro scale.

interest at zero means that you are stepping on the gas pedal and the car is hardly moving, so of curse a crash is coming, a big one

It's been like that since the last crash.

I think that this is the result of the wider economic turmoil we're experiencing since 2008. The US economy, in theory, is recovering but the biggest player worldwide is Europe and Europe right now can't handle a few hundred thousand immigrants - should be trivial given the available resources. Europe has political midgets in a time when at least mediocre politicians would be needed all over the place (France, Germany, UK, etc.).

So I think it's mainly EUs fault. That said if the US fails to regulate the financial sector in the years to come, we're going to see recurrent financial turmoils until we end up with WW3.

> So I think it's mainly EUs fault

Yeah right, let's blame Europe for yet another US bubble. The last 2 crisis were entirely US made.

To be honest, the EU debt crisis is 100% self inflicted. In a try to unify the European countries around a set of rules (Maastricht treaty) Germany is destroying the EU while France is watching.

The EU is in no position to point fingers. Even the lame QE issued by ECB - a little too late - was so heavily contested by the Bundesbank, it's hilarious. The country that profited the most by boosting it's exports, is killing the whole project just because the other countries didn't abide to some rules written on paper 10 years ago.

Some of my friends expressed similar concerns, for what it's worth.

Not trying to be condescending, but legitimately not much. Anecdotes don't really help us here.

Jobs created: "Yay! The economy is growing! The economy created xxx,xxx jobs last month! This is a great sign!"

Jobs destroyed: "This can't be a sign of anything. Anecdotes don't help us."

You're comparing things across different levels. You have something at a macro level in one (jobs created across the economy) and at a micro level in the other (jobs destroyed at a single company). The economy as a whole might still net create jobs even with Intel laying off 11% of its workforce. Likewise, you can have the labor market across the economy shrinking while other companies are ramping up hiring. A single data point does not indicate a trend.

I probably should've realized it was a rhetorical question.

isn't a more direct conclusion is that chip progress has slowed. People's upgrade cycle has extended significantly, and thus less demand for Intel's products?