Maybe it's not really so bad?

The Coyote points out that redundancies are happening faster than drop in output, so he thinks at least part of the crisis is anticipatory behaviour.

Another possibility that occurs to me, is that the credit crunch is a pretext for businesses to become more efficient and cut out deadwood in a way they'd long been planning to do anyway.

Survivalism

Michael Panzner finds another useful article, this time by Laura Coffey on making contingency plans for losing your job.

I sent a circular to my clients in the late 90s, urging them to take out redundancy insurance, because I thought the coming stockmarket crash would be followed by recession; but of course I didn't anticipate that the government would use monetary inflation to defer the reckoning (and, I now fear, make it worse). Articles like Coffey's are straws in the wind, I think.