Pretty cynical and unfair IMO. Meta layoffs were the first time the company did layoffs in its entire history. Layoffs are super unpopular with employees. It's not like they wanted to do it.
This argument is lazy. Like suddenly there's a huge wave of layoffs, and your explanation is "they could." That really offers no explanation for why it happened now vs. literally any other time.
Scaling quickly has risks and the current wave of layoffs is just a way to minimize risk. It is probably better this way than raising tons of cash until things are falling apart and you are forced into panic mode.
If some divisions or individual employees in a company are not making meaningful impact on the bottom line and are not long-term strategic for future profits, then it makes sense to let them go.
Just because these are hugely profitable companies, doesn't mean you should be spending money on things that will not lead to you generating additional funds. That is like keeping real-estate rented but not filling it with people -- it is wasted resources, whether it is humans or real-estate.
These companies over-hired or were sloppy in terms of their spending and that has changed in the new environment.
Like, for example: an end to pauses on payments for debts, expiring eviction bans/moratoriums, companies looking to dump housing and commercial buildings causing a collapse in prices that other financial instruments depend on, government shutdown (and financial consequences of just the threat) leading an enormous group of already marginal people to fall over the edge.
And that's just a few minutes of coming up with plausible things. Something has to give and, historically speaking, something will.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-100-billion-drag-on-u-s-...
Soon after they started hiking the rates there were some of the biggest bank failures in US history which amounted to nothing much because they basically hit snooze on it by effectively promising to back 100% of deposits well above the FDIC threshold. Supposedly this measure runs out in a year from when it was made.
I’m not going to try and predict what and when exactly is going to happen. If you like lines and extrapolation, you can go to the St Louis fed website and plot yield curve inversion and effective fed rate.
Housing prices will continue to be an indefinite bubble due to boomer economics.
Healthcare is a disaster in this country and will never be fixed because of Citizens United.
None of this is due to the economic downturn.
What is boomer economics?
Total nonsense. Businesses are closing.