Crisis May Cost World 20M Jobs

The financial sector is slashing workers, and Silicon Valley employees are dropping like prices on last year's iPod. What industry is next? All of them, Moira Herbst writes in BusinessWeek. Every company relies on credit and consumer purchasing power, making this an “equal-opportunity recession,” a staffing agent says. The damage could be 20 million jobs globally, Reuters adds.

Construction, real estate, financial, and auto companies will be worst hit as jobs disappear next year. Various governments and agencies are scrambling to pump resources into the global economy to mitigate this crisis, which could break a global unemployment record. Countries with strong domestic markets, like China, are expected to fare better than those immersed in the globalized economy. (More financial crisis stories.)