Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Not necessarily. And in fact, a new study from the Federal Reserve emphasizes this, and says that although layoffs can certainly be bad for individual workers, they can actually be good for both the company and the broader economy. For example, they can indicate that the company is becoming more productive, is better able to produce more with fewer workers. Now, this does result in the remaining workers perhaps being paid more, although it also results in labor being released for other jobs.

"Now, that point is actually important because - think about it - if we still had a third of our folks working on the farm like we did 70 years ago, who would staff all the tech companies and all the health care companies and the financial firms? So it is important to an economy to have the ability to move people around into different products and different areas. And if the layoffs also occur because some products are outdated and there are other products that are now coming on-line, then again, you need to have that labor shift. You need to have some companies laying people off in order for those folks to go take the new jobs. So as with many things in economics, there is a much deeper meaning here to job layoffs."