Obama pick for treasury secretary tells Senate: Trillions for the banks, austerity for the people

Major corporate layoffs continue apace. Manufacturer and auto supplier Eaton Corp has announced 5,200 job cuts. Taken together with the 3,400 workers Eaton laid off late last year, the company has eliminated 10 percent of its total workforce. United Airlines announced that it is sacking another 1,000 workers. Mining giant BHP Billiton is to reduce its workforce by 6 percent, affecting 6,000 positions. Most of these are in Australia and Chile, while about 550 workers in Arizona will also reportedly be laid off.

Global economic activity is contracting at an accelerating rate. The International Monetary Fund has warned that it will sharply cut world growth forecasts in a new report due to be released in the next few days. "Things are not improving," IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told the BBC.

In Japan, the world's second-largest economy, the government has downgraded its assessment of the national economy for the fourth straight month. Also in Asia, Singaporean officials said yesterday they expected gross domestic product to decline this year by 2 to 5 percent, revising an earlier forecast issued just three weeks ago of growth ranging from negative 2 percent to 1 percent. In the fourth quarter of 2008, Singapore's largely export-driven economy contracted by 16.9 percent on an annualized basis.

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