Luddites on social media channels were having a field day as Ford become the latest multinational to slash jobs while an artificial intelligence firm was bought for US$250mln by Microsoft.
The US car giant will shed hundreds of jobs in the UK and Germany as part of a programme to save US$200mln (£138mln) a year.
Regulatory burdens in Europe were to blame it said even though the business posted a profit for the first time in four years in 2015.
The group will ask for voluntary redundancies, mainly in administration and marketing, among its 53,000 European employees.
If headlines about job cuts are indeed a red flag for recession, the omens are not good at present.
BP yesterday said it would cut 7,000 workers. Overnight, Yahoo announced a 15% reduction its workforce while 500 people are to go in Centrica’s loft and cavity wall insulation business.
Earnings coming under pressure both here and in the US is to blame, with more brokers using the R-word in their research.
“Based on current valuations, the prices of most stocks don’t appear to have factored in a recession scenario, hence the downside should we see a recession could be rather severe,” RBC Capital Markets said.
Perhaps that is why replacing expensive staff with machinery seems to be gathering momentum.
The acquisition of Swiftkey by Microsoft takes it into the area of predictive keyboards, surely one of the most annoying bits of tech ever invented/innovative/inevitably/Inverness, (imo).
Swiftkey though moves at a higher level to the normal word prompts and is best known as a contributor to Stephen Hawking’s voice system. It recognises his thought patterns and suggests what words he might use next.
Professor Hawking, however, was recently quoted as saying the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.
Arria NLG (LON:ARG) is another firm making great strides in AI and today the AIM tiddler was awarded its sixth US patent.
A firm bulletin board favourite, Arria shares rose 16% as the group picked up a patent over tech that means financial reports re-write themselves when new data comes in.
Also on the tech front, Haydale Graphene Industries (LON:HAYD) has acquired the rights to a new graphene-based invention originating from Swansea University. The new invention relates to heatable articles, particularly clothing and bedding, which incorporate carbon nanomaterial-based heaters.
Instem (LON:INS), which provides the software used to log clinical trials, said it is raising £5mln that it will use to fund acquisitions. It placed 2.5mln shares at 200p – a very small discount to the market price of the stock.
Oil remains pretty high on most financial chat lists at present and ahead of the latest US inventories was weak again. What the market probably needs is some bumbling clerk to underestimate the number by a few million barrels.
Finally, on the subject of stumbles, Clydesdale’s start to life on the London stock market finally got underway.
The challenger bank was spun out of parent firm the National Australia Bank (NAB) but only after a delay of 24 hours due to a request for more info from a credit agency.
Shares of the spin-out were priced at 180p - the lower end of expectations of between 175p and 235p a share.
On a tough day for the financial sector, shares were trading at 188p in conditional dealings.