Layoffs are back: Spike in jobless claims points to faltering recovery Thu Aug 19, 6:13 PM Christopher S. Rugaber, The Associated Press By Christopher S. Rugaber, The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Layoffs are back, and that's bad news for the fragile U.S. economic recovery.
New applications for unemployment benefits hit a nine-month high last week — a spike that suggests private employers may shed jobs this month for the first time this year.
Workers are losing construction jobs in Georgia and manufacturing jobs in Indiana. Some of the layoffs are coming as stimulus money dries up and public works projects come to a halt. Government employees are being let go, too, as states and cities grapple with budget crises.
Without more jobs, consumers will not feel secure enough to spend much money, further slowing the economy. The grim outlook has economists lowering their estimates for growth in the second half of the year. And on Thursday it led to a sell-off on Wall Street led by investors worried that the United States could tumble back into recession.
"Today's news on the economy has been nothing but awful," Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a note to clients. "The recovery is clearly slowing."
The U.S. Labour Department announced Thursday that initial claims for jobless benefits rose by 12,000 last week to 500,000 — the highest level since November and the third straight increase.
As the economy recovered from the worst downturn since the 1930s, jobless claims declined steadily from a peak of 651,000 in March 2009 to a low of 427,000 in July before rising steadily over the last six weeks. In a healthy economy, jobless claims usually drop below 400,000.
"This is obviously a disappointing number that shows ongoing weakness in the job market," said Robert Dye, senior economist at the PNC Financial Services Group.................>>>>....................>>>>................http://ca.news.finance.yahoo.c.....tering-recovery.html
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August 20, 2010, 4:48am
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Wait - Obama/Pelosi said the economy is getting better. I thought in a good economy, businesses were HIRING?
I don't have too much faith in an administration in which only 8% of the people involved in running this country has ever had a real job that required them to make payroll and show a profit in order to pay their employees.
Some of the layoffs are coming as stimulus money dries up and public works projects come to a halt.
This is why the stimulus money was nothing more than putting off the inevitable. I said last year that they should have let everything FALL! We would have already had one year under our belt for rebuilding the economy by means of CAPITALISM! And couple all of this with placing fees on businesses to pay for obamacare and all of the added taxes and fees implemented by fed, state and local governments, no raises, layoffs, no jobs and we are actually worse off now than we were last August!
I know.....it's all bush's fault!!!
What's obama gonna pull out of his a$$, turban hat now?
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
It's called 'pump 'em up' 101.....a special course.....it can be used by advertisers or politicians to complete their degrees.....although I think the politician degree actually goes from pump 'em up 101 to 'blow smoke up their a**' 107.......I did see one called 'paint a pretty picture' 103.......
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Clearly the "George Worst Bush Economic Meltdown" is more severe than even the worst skeptics imagined!
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
Obama WH knew drilling moratorium would cost 23,000 jobs POSTED AT 12:15 PM ON AUGUST 23, 2010 BY ED MORRISSEY
Remember in December when the White House said it would make a “hard pivot” from health care to jobs? That “hard pivot” didn’t materialize until months later, and in a completely different form than one might have assumed. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration’s moratorium on drilling in the Gulf cost Americans 23,000 jobs — and that Barack Obama knew it when he ordered it:
Senior Obama administration officials concluded the federal moratorium on deepwater oil drilling would cost roughly 23,000 jobs, but went ahead with the ban because they didn’t trust the industry’s safety equipment and the government’s own inspection process, according to previously undisclosed documents.
Critics of the moratorium, including Gulf Coast political figures and oil-industry leaders, have said it is crippling the region’s economy, and some have called on the administration to make public its economic analysis. A federal judge who in June threw out an earlier six-month moratorium faulted the administration for playing down the economic effects. …
They show the new top regulator or offshore oil exploration, Michael Bromwich, told Interior Secretary Ken Salazar that a six-month deepwater-drilling halt would result in “lost direct employment” affecting approximately 9,450 workers and “lost jobs from indirect and induced effects” affecting about 13,797 more. The July 10 memo cited an analysis by Mr. Bromwich’s agency that assumed direct employment on affected rigs would “resume normally once the rigs resume operations.”
This may have been a necessary tradeoff if the moratorium was really the needed solution. However, even the President’s own task force on the Gulf crisis didn’t believe it to be necessary. They publicly rebuked the White House for misleading the public by linking the ban to their analysis of the disaster, which never contemplated a blanket moratorium.
In the end, the moratorium replaced action by the administration to address the critical failings in its own regulatory regime:
In another document, William Hauser, chief of the regulations and standards branch of what was formerly called the Minerals Management Service, outlined the risks of various drilling activities in an email to colleagues and then wrote: “The more I write this stuff the more I believe we can/should/could regulate/stop activities through a prudent management process versus a moratoria scheme.”
He added, “I guess the moratoria approach is necessary because the MMS cannot be trusted to regulate.” Mr. Hauser couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.
Rather than fix their own problems (which, to be fair, predated this administration as well as continued under Obama and Salazar), Obama and his team instead imposed the ban, killing thousands of jobs and setting back the economy of the Gulf by years — literally. The capital equipment needed to produce oil in the Gulf has begun to disperse to foreign waters, thanks to the government’s refusal to allow continued drilling by companies that had nothing to do with Deepwater Horizon. Any new drilling will take years to restart if those rigs float away to other resources, and the capital investment that created today’s rigs may not be as easy to acquire in the wake of the arbitrary nature of Obama’s actions.
That’s one of the reasons why we’re already having trouble producing jobs. This is just a microcosm of Obamanomics.
obama knew 'exactly' what he was doing right from the beginning. He's killin us!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
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