Here is where the layoffs will hurt

Business Insider: The National Restaurant Association just released its Restaurant Performance Index for December. And it suddenly plunged.

The RPI is a composite of the Current Situation Index and the Expectations Index, both of which track restaurant operators’ responses on same-store sales, traffic, labor, and capital expenditures. “Steady-state level” is 100. Values above indicate expansion, values below indicate contraction. In the data series going back to 2003, the RPI has ranged from its peak of 103.5 in 2004 to its low 96.5 during the worst moment of the Financial Crisis.

“As a result of broad-based declines in both current situation and expectations indicators,” – as the report started out – the RPI for December fell to 99.7, from 101.3 in November and from 102.1 in October, 2.4% in two months, the worst two-month plunge since early 2008, at the cusp of the Financial Crisis.

Retail brick and mortar is in  a hiring contraction, now the restaurant business,   Manufacturing is not hiring much. The California local governments are getting cash short. Trucking and fracking in  contraction. We need Chinese home buyers and another month of car sales, or its blue bar.