For instance, we’re dealing with an uncharacteristically high percentage of people who have been out of work for six months or more—the so-called long-term unemployed—which says something about how difficult it is for people to find new jobs. The National Employment Law Project and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment …
The job market is turning. Which means the recession is ending, unless …
Yesterday it was the ADP employment estimate and the Challenger layoff numbers. Today, weekly unemployment claims. I’ll take it from Ian Sheperdson of High Frequency Economics, who had been extremely suspicious of earlier signs of a turn in the data:
Jobless claims fell 34K to 601K, well below the consensus 635K and the lowest reading
…
Wells Fargo: Maybe not that much smarter than everybody else
Bloomberg is now reporting that Wells Fargo will need $15 billion in new capital as a result of its stress test. This is a lot less than Bank of America’s $34 billion (or so), but it’s still something of a comedown for a bank that has been making the argument that it
TIME 100: Paul Krugman makes me cry, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says she’s proud of me, and I squeeze out one lousy Tweet
I ran into Paul Krugman on the street yesterday afternoon. I asked him if he was going to the TIME 100 dinner that night (he’s on the list). He sort of sighed and said yeah—adding that he’d agreed to speak for two minutes and was having trouble coming up with something “uplifting” to say. I chortled and said we hadn’t put him on the …
The job market turns?
Two intriguing job market data points this morning:
1) “Automatic Data Processing, a payroll-processing firm, said private-sector employment decreased by 491,000 in April, a 31% improvement from the revised 708,000 drop in March. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had expected a loss of 643,000 jobs last month.”
2) “Separately, …
Green shoots down Mexico way?
It seems we are now to be optimistic about the direction of the economy. Justin writes about that here.
I was meeting with some economic-development-types from El Paso and Juárez earlier today and asked if they saw signs of “green shoots.” Alan Russell, president of the TECMA Group, which helps U.S. companies set up across the border …
Maybe all those Bush library donations don’t mean what you think they do
Lots of people are giving lots of money to help George Bush build a library. TIME’s Michael Weisskopf and Michael Duffy, down in D.C.-land, report that since leaving office, Bush has raised more than $100 million. It took Clinton two years to raise that much.
I’m bringing that up here because I was recently chatting with Dean Karlan, a …
For the stock market, is it 1982 or 1974?
Barry Ritholtz asks the big question for stock market investors:
In terms of historical analogies, investors should be asking themselves: Is this move more like 1982 or 1974?
It’s gotta be 1974. Late that year, the stock market began to bounce back from the collapse of 1973-1974. It topped out in late 1976, then spent the next six years …
Tough times for Wall Street’s “middle class” in Ridgewood, NJ
Mark Clothier and John Helyar have written a fine Bloomberg article about tough times in Ridgewood, NJ, that doesn’t seem to be available anywhere on the Bloomberg site but is reprinted at length in the Newark Star-Ledger (thanks to Jim Kim of Fierce Finance for the initial tip, although I ended up having to find the article myself). …
In the future your bank might also sell you toilet paper and diet Coke
Adam Smith, who works out of our London office, has a story up on Time.com today about the problems caused by folks no longer trusting banks. He throws some numbers at us:
According to the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index, a new quarterly measure of Americans’ confidence in financial institutions, faith in banks — on
…
The other half of the Conde Nast story (newspapers)
My initial reaction to last week’s news that Conde Nast Portfolio was closing down was so selfish that it kept me from blogging on the subject: Roger Lowenstein was gonna review my book in the June issue. And now there won’t be a June issue. What a travesty!
Well, now I’ve read John Koblin’s epic telling of the Portfolio saga in the New …
The sleepy French (and sleepy Americans)
This just in from the OECD:
The French spend more time sleeping than anyone else in OECD countries. They also devote more time to eating than anyone else and nearly double that of Americans, Canadians or Mexicans. The Japanese sleep nearly an hour less every night than the French and also spend longer at work and commuting than they do
…