Oracle’s 23-Year Loop

How Labor Became the New Subprime

If you’re reading this from an Oracle IP… welcome.

And if you understand how subprime actually worked, the parallels should be uncomfortable.

Oracle isn’t just laying people off. It’s repricing human labor… again.

What’s happening inside Oracle right now isn’t a workforce event or an AI transition story… it is straight up a a risk transfer. The same kind of risk transfer that defined the subprime era: volatility moved off the balance sheet, smoothed by models, and pushed downstream until it no longer appeared where decisions were being made. The layoffs are not the story. They are simply the mechanism by which labor is being abstracted, sliced, and reclassified.

To understand what’s unfolding at Oracle, you have to stop counting exits and start looking at composition. Layoff headlines are noise. I mean, you have probably followed me for years, so you know the drill. See the headline- don’t believe a word they say- we dive into the workforce data instead. This is the same thing with Oracle and why I am going through this now.

The signal I’m looking at is how the workforce is changing as a percentage of the whole, which functions are being removed versus rebuilt, and how responsibility is redistributed once humans are taken out of the loop. That’s where the subprime parallel stops being metaphorical and starts being structural.

By the end of 2025, what Oracle experienced was not a single layoff event but a multi-quarter workforce contraction that cumulatively removed roughly ten to twelve percent of the company’s human labor capacity, depending on how you measure internal versus externalized roles.