Announcements from Bank of America of plans to fire 30,000 workers and the United States Post Office to sack 120,000 are fueling fears that more layoffs and recession loom large for everyone, the New York Times reports, citing Gallup data.

Fears of job losses today are at their highest since the last recession just a few years ago, the Times adds.

Other studies find that layoff announcements last August were worse than the same month a year earlier.

Fresh hires are likely to become fresh fires, experts say.

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"Employers are likely to target the employees who are more junior, as they usually do," says Daniel S. Hamermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas, Austin, the Times reports.

"If you’ve already exhausted your benefits for that benefit year — and Congress has said they want to shorten the duration of benefits — you’re up the creek. That’s one of the most severe worries about all this."

The European debt crisis and fears that President Barack Obama's jobs bill will spark another political impasse in Washington similar to the one surrounding raising the debt ceiling are hurting confidence.

The International Monetary Fund, meanwhile, says both the U.S. and Europe remain at risk of dipping back into recession.

"Global activity has weakened and become more uneven, confidence has fallen sharply recently, and downside risks are growing," the IMF says, according to The Guardian.

"The structural problems facing the crisis-hit advanced economies have proven even more intractable than expected, and the process of devising and implementing reforms even more complicated."