The biggest companies in the United States are giving the axe to hundreds of thousands of workers, but this should not come as a shock to any of us.  Officials at the Federal Reserve were warned over and over again that they were going to create an extremely harsh economic environment if they aggressively raised interest rates, and that is exactly what has transpired.  We haven't seen a tsunami of layoffs like this since 2008 and 2009, and the outlook for the months ahead is extremely bleak.

Many of us warned the Fed that it would be mind-numbingly stupid to push interest rates much higher just as we were entering a major economic downturn, but of course the Fed didn't want to listen.