BRIEF: Big test for South Florida job market on Friday
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By Douglas Hanks, The Miami Herald
May 18–Nationally, the labor market has produced some troubling statistics in recent months. But South Florida managed to elude the bad news. On Friday, the region finds out if it enjoyed a better April than the rest of the country did.
The monthly employment report for states and counties lags the national report by about two weeks. The April numbers due at 10 a.m. from Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity are only a more detailed slice of a glum April hiring report for the nation, which saw only 115,000 new jobs — about half the pace of job growth during the start of 2012.
March also saw weak national hiring numbers, but South Florida managed to put in a fairly strong month. Unemployment dropped from 8 percent to 7.9 percent in Broward despite a slight uptick in job applicants, and Miami-Dade saw its rate drop from 10.3 percent to just under 10 percent amid growth in both jobs and job applicants.
Nationally, the unemployment rate was 8.1 percent in April, down from 8.2 percent.
Whatever the numbers Friday, they are likely to only slightly alter the employment crater left in South Florida by the Great Recession. The region is down about 126,000 jobs from peaks set in August 2007.
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Read More»Bay State adds 2,500 jobs as unemployment hits 6.3 percent
By Donna Goodison, Boston Herald
May 17–Massachusetts’ unemployment rate dipped to 6.3 percent in April, but the dire national economic picture still is weighing on the state, according to economists.
Massachusetts added an estimated 2,500 jobs last month, for a total of 3.24 million jobs, according to preliminary estimates released today by the state’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate inched down 0.2 percentage points below the March rate of 6.5 percent.
“Obviously moving in the right direction, but it’s not a lot of job growth,” said Elliot Winer, chief economist at Northeast Economic Analysis Group LLC in Sudbury.
The national unemployment rate was at 8.1 percent in April.
Massachusetts has a stronger economy than the rest of the states, and typically pulls out of recessions faster, but its 6.3 percent unemployment rate is likely about as good as can be hoped for until the national economy improves, according to economist David Tuerck of Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute, a conservative think tank.
“The further expansion of the Massachusetts economy is going to be stalled until the national job picture brightens up,” Tuerck said. “The national jobs picture is terrible. Nationally, we’re way below creating the number of jobs we need to create in order for the economy to recover.”
Massachusetts’ private sector added 3,400 jobs in April. Professional, scientific and business services added 4,200 jobs for the sector’s 10th monthly gain, and trade, transportation and utilities saw an increase of 900 jobs.
The state last month saw a loss of 1,300 construction jobs, 1,200 manufacturing jobs and 900 government jobs, including 600 state government positions.
dgoodison@bostonherald.com
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Read More»Economic Outlook: Tough choices in Greece
By ANTHONY HALL
Greece’s latest economic proposal makes perfect sense, at least to Athens; not so much for the international community.
The strategy so far has been for Greece to sell assets, cut expenses, raise fees and taxes to prove, in effect, that Greece is able to meet the terms of massive international loans.
That went over in Greece like a lead balloon.
Now Greek voters — although leaders are struggling to form a coalition government — have given the momentum to leaders who are calling for a plan to stimulate the economy so that it can get back on its feet.
Enough cutting jobs and government spending and heaping on expensive loans and taxes and hoping for the best, the voters are saying. It’s not like there isn’t some homespun logic behind that.
What the European Union appears to have forgotten is the lesson learned by formerly all-powerful Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
OPEC, although little less powerful in recent years given expanded oil production, learned long ago it could name its price for a barrel of oil. But OPEC also realized if it bankrupts its customers with high oil prices, it only would be hurting itself.
The EU and the International Monetary Fund assembling huge loans for Greece and demanding they cut spending at the same time was a political rationalization all along. The key ingredient was not Germany helping Greece. It was German Chancellor Angela Merkel returning to Berlin after negotiations in Brussels or Paris and telling voters, “We will help Greece, but, boy, they are really going to have to suffer for it.”
That kind of tough love sold well for a while. The problem was not enough people stopped to wonder if it was wise to give Greece a loan and cut off its income at the same time. This column kept wondering how the best financial minds in Europe could get together and hand Greek billions of dollars in loans with a formula that sounded like a punch line. “Let’s give them billions in loans and cut off their income — ha, ha, ha,” might be a good joke during lunch at a convention of bankers. Surprisingly, it was also the formula in Europe.
Read More»BRIEF: California unemployment falls slightly to 10.9 percent
By Andrew Edwards, San Bernardino County Sun, Calif.
May 18–California’s official unemployment rate ticked down to 10.9 percent in April, down from 11 percent the previous month.
The state’s nonfarm employment, however, declined by 4,200 jobs and the state’s labor force was reduced by 4,900 jobs.
In the Inland Empire, the official unemployment rate fell a full percentage point to 11.7 percent, but other numbers suggest the region’s labor markets may have actually weakened.
Despite a drip in its unemployment rate, San Bernardino and Riverside counties lost 1,800 nonfarm jobs from March to April. The two counties’ labor force shrunk by some 24,000 people, a 1.3 percent drop from March to April.
Los Angeles County’s unemployment rate fell from 11.8 to 11.6 percent in April. The state’s most populous county lost 7,100 nonfarm jobs and the labor force declined by 16,000 people.
Reach Andrew via email, call him at 909-386-3872, or find him on Twitter @InlandBizz.
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(c)2012 the San Bernardino County Sun (San Bernardino, Calif.)
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Read More»Facebook effect cheers traders but fails to lift market gloom
By Gideon Spanier, London Evening Standard
May 18–Facebook’s mega-float was the only thing cheering up traders as they fretted about a “Grexit” on another grim day for European equities.
As the social networking site made its $104 billion (pounds sterling 65 billion) debut on New York’s Nasdaq this afternoon, City scribblers were trying to work out if any UK companies will benefit from the “Facebook effect”.
Liberum Capital’s media team was upbeat about the prospects of the big advertising groups and dismissed the idea that brands will bypass agencies to deal directly with the likes of Facebook.
“Advertisers are unlikely to ditch the agencies — as long as they keep their skills up to date — given the need for a holistic approach,” said Liberum’s Ian Whittaker. “In essence, the greater the complexity, the greater the advice that clients require.”
Liberum’s top pick is Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP, the world’s biggest advertising group, which has 140,000 employees, an annual revenue last year of just more than pounds sterling 10 billion and a stock market value of about pounds sterling 9.7 billion.
On the other hand, Facebook is worth almost seven times as much, has 3000 employees and revenues of pounds sterling 2 billion. If it sounds like a bubble and it looks like a bubble…
Still, traders can rarely look beyond next week and, with the eurozone saga continuing to weigh on sentiment, WPP was marked down 19p at 768.5p in a falling market.
The FTSE 100 tumbled as much as 1.5 percent, before settling down 55.21 points or 1 percent at 5283. That means the index has fallen every day this week and is down close to 12 percent from this year’s peak of around 5960, in mid-March. Today marks the lowest level for the Footsie since last November.
Lloyds Banking Group, down 0.82p at 26.85p, and Royal Bank of Scotland, sliding 0.64p at 20.42p, were among the worst losers, each falling 3 percent on euro-debt fears.
The number of risers in the top 100 could be counted on one hand. “Never a truer word about ‘Sell in May and go away’,” said one trader ruefully.
Read More»April: 3,100 fewer jobs in Minnesota
By Dee DePass, Star Tribune, Minneapolis
May 18–Minnesota employers cut 3,100 jobs in April, mostly in the retail, construction, hospitality and government sectors, state officials announced Thursday.
April’s jobs loss marked the first monthly decline since November as only three out of 11 sectors reported job gains last month — manufacturing, financial activities and health and education.
The clearly disappointing April report, which followed a flat March and significant job gains in December, January and February, left economists speculating about possible explanations ranging from the unusually warm winter to statistical methods used to seasonally adjust the figures.
Warm weather sped up restaurant, construction and golf club hiring earlier in the year instead of in March and April.
“If I have to take the job numbers at face value, then it looks like we are in a sluggish environment and that the labor market could be weakening over the last three months,” said Wells Fargo senior economist Scott Anderson. “If true, we are not super-surprised because we are also seeing this as a national trend.”
But calculations that make adjustments for such seasonal changes, may have gone too far and undercounted job gains, Anderson said.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in April, which is derived from a separate survey, dropped 0.2 percentage point to 5.6 percent. Minnesota’s unemployment rate remains well below the 8.1 percent national rate. State officials attributed Minnesota’s declining unemployment rate to baby boomers retiring and to more discouraged workers ending job searches.
Steve Hine, director of the state’s Labor Market Information Office, noted that the labor force participation rate is down to 71.1 percent, a level not seen since 1983.
Hine blamed the under-reporting of jobs on monthly employer-survey sizes that were too small and on new calculations used by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hine said annual benchmark revisions will be done by the federal government, but not until around March 2013.
“I am very discouraged by the underestimation that is becoming more and more apparent in this monthly survey,” Hine said.
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