As the rolling stone of gloom gathers yet more moss, the issue of unemployment has come to the fore again. Over the last few years many employers have struggled to keep people on the payroll. The sexy industries found that their employees were lured away by improved terms and conditions from their competitors, while less-fashionable industries battled to keep experienced people who knew that they could walk into another job in any sector any time they liked.

Employees could pick and choose the hours they wanted to work and employers were forced to adopt a more flexible approach to working practices. Which, I believe, wasn't a bad thing, given that in the recession-hit years before now the behaviour of some employers made Scrooge look like an affable philanthropist.

Unemployment in the Republic was at a 19-year low by the end of 2000, but the sting in the tail was the announcement of sizeable job losses in the hitherto employee-friendly telecom and technology sectors.

It's not exactly a surprise, given the battering those sectors have taken internationally over the last few months, but it's unwelcome nonetheless.

Both sectors poured vast amounts of money into expansion, takeovers and new technology and now they have to pay for them. News that sales of home computers and mobile phones have begun to fall means that rationalisation is now the buzz-word among many companies for whom, only last year, the mantra seemed to be spend, spend, spend.

Many computer companies have already cut the prices of their products to the consumer to shift inventory. Now they're working on ways to cut overheads on the factory floor. And the easiest, quickest way to cut costs is to make people redundant.

Sports stars often justify their stratospheric pay-packets by pointing out how brief their careers can be. The same can be said for some of the new economy jobs. While newspaper reports last year spoke in awe of twentysomethings earning massive salaries plus share options and benefits, those salaries reflected the urgency of the need for people at the time.

With that urgency fast disappearing, the salaries won't be quite as high in the future. The share options have, in many cases, already gone the way of some of the loonier dotcoms. People who once looked in envy at the new generation of earners might be feeling a little less hard done by right now .

Many people employed in old economy jobs spent a lot of time over the last couple of years worrying about new economy competition. Employees were told how Internet firms would start up and whip business from under their noses. And companies that had been in the market for a very long time had to jostle for investment in an environment where new was good and old meant inefficient.

This was particularly so in the financial services industries where banks and brokers were fighting off Internet banks and online brokerages that were insisting they could offer better services to customers.

Internet banking has yet to prove profitable, while the downturn in markets has walloped many online brokerage houses, particularly in the US where they are now involved in those cost-cutting exercises I mentioned earlier.

Ameritrade, one of the US's big online brokers, announced last week that it was laying off 14 per cent of its workforce, following a lowering of its earnings forecasts. The problem for online brokers is that they need a high level of turnover from investors in order to make money. But the type of customer they need - the trader rather than the buy-and-hold investor - has been pole-axed over the past few months and just isn't trading.

It's a potential opportunity for older houses to pick up the online businesses at a decent price, something that brokers should know all about. In fact, there is potential for many of the savvier old economy businesses to have a look at online competitors to see if they can pick up a bargain and add value to their bricks-and-mortar companies.

The problem for many of the e-businesses was that they loved the technology so much they forgot about the whole idea of making money. And, in the end, the whole reason for being in business is to make money. Certainly, once you've floated the company, your investor base isn't going to sit around and admire the technology if the dividends don't come rolling in too.

As far as the market is concerned, it is sectors rather than individual stocks that are in the frame right now, so every technology company is getting tarred with the same brush - just as it was on the way up when companies doomed to fail were still being flagged as great "opportunities". The tech sector has probably become cheap in an overall context, but single stocks have the ability to blow you out of the water. Even with its massive price falls, Cisco still needs growth of around 30 per cent a year to justify current pricing .

The Nasdaq may be reeling and can almost certainly fall some more, but it's probably a safer bet than trying to find the one decent tech stock left out there.

It's a much trickier time for everyone right now. A slowing economy is one thing but once you start seeing job losses (especially in companies which are big employers in specific areas), the knock-on effects aren't long in taking hold. People will be less inclined to splash out their more-limited spare cash on speculative shares, overpriced lattes and Wap phones.

And, despite those predictions of further increases in house prices for this year, people are less inclined to move when times are tougher but renovate instead. Good news for my builder, who is much in demand now that he has finally called it a day as far as working on the home office is concerned.

I am delighted to report that the kango hammer has fallen silent, the cement mixer has gone, the skip has finally disappeared and the cat is no longer addicted to prescription drugs.

Unfortunately, the completion of the office means that I have no excuse for missing deadlines in the future. Every silver lining has its own particular cloud.