DETROIT — The timing is notable.

A decade after the Great Recession threw the Detroit Big 3 automakers into a tailspin, along with so many Americans who lost their homes and life savings, General Motors CEO Mary Barra on Monday announced her company will shutter factories and eliminate an estimated 14,000 white collar and blue-collar jobs.

Critics decried her as ruthless. And the value of GM stock grew.

Soon Ford will announce its early retirement buyouts amid reorganization, a signal that the economic landscape goes beyond GM. No question, things were bound to deteriorate. The whole business is cyclical, after all.

And the largest car market in the world, China, is seeing a slowdown, too.

So cutting passenger cars once seen as key to U.S. carmakers’ recovery appears to make sense.

Yet no one needs to be frightened, economists say.

America is at full employment and that’s good for the economy.

But when GM sheds about 7,000 workers in the metro Detroit area, for a total of 14,000 or so in North America, that’s significant.

When Ford is forecast to trim 10,000 workers from its rolls in metro Detroit for a total of 20,000 or so in North America, well, those numbers start to add up.

Preparing for the next dip“Car sales hit a record in 2016 and have been edging downward since,” said Michelle Krebs, senior analyst for Autotrader. “At the same time, the auto industry is on the verge of potentially massive change. Auto companies are investing in future things, like autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, mobility services like ride sharing. No one is clear on when those will turn a profit.”She continued, “The major takeaway of the Great Recession was that automakers must keep their cost in line so that even if sales plummeted they could still break even or eke out a profit.Coming out of the recession, automakers laid off workers and cut plant capacity. They’ve gotten a bit complacent. As the good times came, the companies added people. Companies like Ford have said maybe they added too many. So now they’re preparing for the next dip. They’re preparing for potential downturn.”What feels today like an upbeat economic atmosphere is misleading, economists said.And focusing exclusively on the strength of America and the U.S. dollar can be a mistake. Markets now are so interconnected that the buying power of Chinese consumers, for example, directly impacts the jobs of people in America.

Rain on the paradeWhile recessions are notoriously difficult to forecast, ingredients do exist for an economic downturn.“Now you will start to see a lot of cutbacks, not just trimming. These are leading cyclical indicators,” said Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, associate director at the University of Michigan Energy Institute.In three to six months, things will likely pivot, she said.“It’s a false premise to think that we can do well and everybody else doesn’t. There’s a co-dependency relationship because of the way our global economy has grown up over the years. We can never spin out, so to speak, and be a planet independent of all the other stars in the universe.”

No panic“We want our tone to be responsible. We don’t want to be panicking,” said Gabriel Ehrlich, an economic forecaster who specializes in the U.S. and Michigan economies.2019 is a time to be “sober-minded and cautious,” he said. “We expect more of a slowdown nationally in 2020.”“Don’t panic, keep calm and carry on,” Ehrlich said. “In Michigan, we’re seeing more jobs in the service industries, from goods producing and a manufacturing economy to a service economy. There’s steady growth in health care and hospitality.”This latest action by GM, after workers “made pretty extraordinary contributions to the company,” is really “a punch in the gut,” Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley said, especially for the white-collar workers.Too often, car companies offer job training after the fact. There’s no preparation, he said.And with every job lost in the auto industry, an estimated five jobs in the community are affected.Meanwhile, Ford reissued a summary of its upcoming plans to “transform” the business through actions over the past 18 months to “redesign and restructure” its global operation.

World viewThe global economy is driving good and bad developments, regardless of political party, said a frustrated Jon Gabrielsen, market economist who advises automakers and auto suppliers.“Anyone who thought (President Donald) Trump could save their jobs was delusional. No person, whether Trump or not, had any more chance of reversing rapidly changing trends than to swim up Niagara Falls,” he said. “Corporations don’t enjoy doing this and their investors don’t enjoy the huge costs to do so. But it sure beats not doing it and going out of business.”GM’s timing goes to strategy, Gabrielsen said. There is a financial advantage to announcing big cuts before Dec. 31. It all involves a bookkeeping strategy that benefits investor relations and allows the company to claim certain losses and later revise and claim certain gains.A week ago, he accurately predicted the number of jobs that GM would cut.This time, Gabrielsen estimates the unemployment impact of the direct Detroit Big 3 automakers salaried job cuts for the metro area could raise unemployment by a little over 1 percentage point just from salaried employees, and with the multiplier impact that could add as much as 4 to 5 points to the metro unemployment rate, which was 4 percent in October 2018.Fiat Chrysler has made no announcements related to cuts or closures.“In the last cycle, unemployment went from 4.5 percent in January 2001 to 16.4 percent in June 2009,” he said. “So rising from 4 percent to 8 or 9 percent unemployment is well within reason.”Once job cuts like this begin, the affected areas see a pattern of unraveling that includes hiring freezes and job cuts in other industries.