Thursday, May 9, 2013 at 6:12PM Aircraft maintenance was a highly paid blue-collar job that required education, training, manual skills, and brains. It was one of the perfect American middle-class jobs with generous healthcare, retirement, and vacation benefits; and free flights! They were working for icons like Delta, American Airlines, Continental, TWA, or Pan Am. Icons indeed!
Friday, May 3, 2013 at 6:52PM “Labor market conditions are affected by factors outside a central bank’s control,” admitted Richmond Fed President Lacker as the employment report bounced around the world. Yet for years, the Fed has proclaimed that the heroic motivation for its selfless money-printing mania was the deep desire to improve the unemployment fiasco for average Americans.
Sunday, April 7, 2013 at 10:25PM Contributed by Chriss Street: Since 2008, 2.2 million jobs have been lost among the 25-54 year olds, even as their numbers grew by over 3 million. Young people who thought they’d scrimp by until they “moved up” now expect to never have a decent life and are trying to adapt to their new reality. Since 2008, America seems to have failed many Americans.
Monday, March 11, 2013 at 6:29PM CEOs of the largest US corporations, without aiming at it, shot barn-door-size holes through the rosy jobs picture. Rosy on the surface: unemployment down to 7.7% with 236,000 new jobs created last month. A picture the White House held up as proof of its success. But these CEOs didn’t see it. Not in the US. Though prospects were rosy in cheap countries.
Thursday, February 7, 2013 at 6:35PM Despite optimism-mongering in the media, in certain quarters of Washington, and elsewhere, we’ve had indication after indication in the economic data that American workers have not benefited from whatever lousy progress has been made in nudging up GDP. But now we know from the horse’s mouth: they’re mired in a tough new reality that is getting worse.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 at 6:21PM Tuesday morning, the 168 remaining employees of DMI in Vaux, a tiny town near Montluçon in the Department of Allier, smack-dab in the middle of France, rigged about ten gas cylinders throughout the factory they’d been occupying and threatened to blow it up—unless their demands were met. Another day in the decline of the private sector à la Française.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 5:22PM The drumbeat of layoffs and plant closures has been riling up desperate workers who have little hope of finding a job elsewhere, with unemployment at 10.5%. But now the Socialist government, worried about a “radicalization” of these angry workers, has instructed police intelligence services to keep an eye on them. Not exactly one of the campaign promises.
Saturday, January 26, 2013 at 5:04PM Contributed by Ted Coine, Author, Speaker, Business Heretic. [Wolf here: this is a little different, but superb. A must-read if you've ever managed people, or if you're going to someday, or if you're starting a business, or if you're the CEO of a Fortune-500 company, or if you've been a working stiff all your life.]
Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 12:22PM Contributed by Chriss Street. Last week, Governor Rick Snyder signed Michigan’s first right-to-work law, which makes it illegal to require workers to join a union or pay union dues. The law was scorned by liberals as destroying jobs at good wages. Yet, GM just announced that it would move production of the iconic Camaro from Canada to Michigan.
Saturday, December 8, 2012 at 5:36PM Friday’s plunge in consumer sentiment was hastily ascribed to the Fiscal Cliff. Like Sandy, it's recruited to explain everything that goes wrong. But over the last few days, one monkey wrench after another has been thrown into the hope machinery, including the collapse of small-business hiring plans to the record low set during the catastrophic post-Lehman days.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012 at 6:17PM Especially of CEOs who parachute into the executive office. Wall Street's knee-jerk reaction can be phenomenal. Citigroup’s massacre of 11,000 souls caused its stock to jump. But the same day, we learn that wages adjusted for inflation dropped 1.4% in the third quarter—a continuation of 12 years of declines that has hollowed out the middle class, pushed people into the lower classes, and devastated the poor.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012 at 6:06PM The inexplicable American consumer, the strongest creature out there that no one has been able to subdue yet, has come to grips with a new reality, euphemistically called “New Normal,” though it isn’t normal by any means, but dismal. Feeling more upbeat, they nudged up the Consumer Confidence Index to a level not seen since February 2008—a level that caused people to tear their hair out at the time.
Sunday, October 7, 2012 at 5:08PM Contributed by Chriss Street. President “Houdini’s” miraculous creation of 873,000 jobs in September magically drove down the unemployment rate from 8.1% to 7.8%. The last time a similar jobs increase appeared was June of 1983 when the economy grew at an astronomical 9.3% annual rate. But behind the smoke and mirrors is the President’s July suspension of the “workfare” requirements for welfare recipients.
Thursday, October 4, 2012 at 8:43AM Contributed by Lee Adler, The Wall Street Examiner. Federal Withholding Tax collections for September were strong. That implied the BLS nonfarm payrolls data to be released Friday should beat consensus expectations. But there are problems with both the withholding tax data, and especially the BLS data, that make the market’s focus on the jobs numbers just a little insane.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012 at 8:35PM It’s been an unrelenting process. Survey after survey has shown that wages haven’t kept up with inflation since the wage peak in 2000. Families earned less at the end of the decade than at the beginning, a phenomenon not seen since World War II—the process of hollowing out the middle class. But now there is a new phenomenon: the unmentionable class, the class that doesn’t exist in America, is ballooning.
Friday, September 7, 2012 at 4:55PM Hope was once again in vogue Thursday night in President Obama’s acceptance speech, after having gone the way of the green shoots. Hope has been swirling around the financial markets as well. The Fed keeps dangling QE3 out in front of them. And ECB President Mario Draghi injected a mega-dose of it with his bond-buying promise. It goosed the markets even more and powered them to multi-year highs. Then came the jobs report.
Saturday, August 11, 2012 at 5:26PM We’ve all heard about Wall Street employees who lost their jobs and ended up doing something unrelated, chasing after a dream, starting up a software company, working on a crab boat, teaching English to immigrants, run a taco truck, become a pole dancer.... So there should be indices that measure the number of people undergoing sudden and unlikely career changes—to give us a better gauge of the real job market.
Saturday, June 30, 2012 at 5:33PM We were doing one more time what on Sunday will become illegal in California: eating foie gras in a restaurant. Pan seared foie gras “traditionally raised in Sonoma, California,” served with poached apricots. I’d go to jail for this anytime. We were at the edge of San Francisco, looking at the Bay and the Bay Bridge draped across it, and we were talking—when we weren’t preoccupied by the divine, unctuous foie gras—about sweet corn and illegal immigrants.
Monday, June 25, 2012 at 9:38PM Certain central bankers are coming out of the closet admitting that their favorite shenanigans—ultralow interest rates and printing money with utter abandon—can’t solve the very problems they were designed to solve, which has been obvious for a long time. What they’re not yet admitting massively, though some are starting to hand out hints, is just how much havoc these policies are wreaking.
Thursday, June 7, 2012 at 2:39PM Since the lousy jobs report, there has been a veritable orgy of Fed Speak with juicy morsels and contradictions, interspersed with leaks and rumors, that climaxed today with Chairman Ben Bernanke’s words of wisdom. It whipped markets into a frenzy, drove the Dow up 500 points, knocked yields to historic lows, and caused gold, the safe-haven, to bounce up and down like a rubber ball. And everyone was eagerly waiting for the big lie.
