Survival News Network

Stock markets in Dubai were down this morning as investors reacted nervously to the latest proposed solution to Dubai World’s $22 billion (£14 billion) debt crisis.
The city’s main index, the Dubai Financial Market fell 0.83 per cent in early trading as it emerged that the troubled state-owned conglomerate plans to offer its creditors just 60 [...]

A majority of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index increased cash to a combined $1.19 trillion while simultaneously reducing spending, keeping a jobs recovery on hold.
Caterpillar Inc., Eaton Corp., Walgreen Co. and General Electric Co. are among 260 companies that ended last quarter with $522 billion more than a year earlier after [...]

We’ve been waiting on this one for a while now…
Over the next several years, failed commercial real estate loans could litter American cities with empty stores and office complexes, cause hundreds of bank failures and weaken the economy, a watchdog report says.
Banks face up to $300 billion in losses on loans made for commercial property [...]

The unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly in January to 9.7
percent, while employers shed 20,000 jobs, according to a report that
offered hope the economy will add jobs soon.
The unemployment rate dropped from 10 percent because a survey of
households found the number of employed Americans rose by 541,000, the
Labor Department said Friday. The job losses are calculated from [...]

As bad as the government’s jobs readings numbers have been during the Great Recession, we’ll soon find out the real situation likely was worse.
Much worse.
Job losses during the recession may have been underestimated by close to a million jobs. So instead of employers cutting just over 7 million jobs from their payrolls since the economic [...]

Oh, ok…
Pope Benedict XVI has urged sense of responsibility from governments, employers and workers as they deal with job losses from the economic crisis.
The pontiff mentioned Fiat’s decision to stop auto production at a plant in Sicily, and Alcoa’s move to idle a smelter in Sardinia. Workers have protested these decisions.
Benedict said during his Angelus [...]

Sales of previously occupied homes took the largest monthly drop in more than 40 years last month, sinking more dramatically than expected after lawmakers gave buyers additional time to use a tax credit.
The report reflects a sharp drop in demand after buyers stopped scrambling to qualify for a tax credit of up to $8,000 for [...]

Sam’s Club said it will use Shopper Events, a third-party company, instead of its own employees to run in-store product demonstrations and hand out food samples — a popular tactic used by warehouse clubs to entice shoppers to buy new items.
In a memo to employees, Cornell said Shopper Events will develop a demo program, called [...]

Europe’s unemployment rate unexpectedly increased to the highest in more than 11 years in November as companies cut costs in the wake of the worst recession in more than six decades.
Unemployment in the euro area rose to 10 percent from a revised 9.9 percent in October, the European Union statistics office in Luxembourg said today. [...]

…as of November, 19.4% of American men in their prime working years didn’t have jobs. By this measure, the current job situation (for men, at least) is much, much worse than in any downturn since the BLS started measuring this stuff in 1948.

Source/Full Story: Curious Capitalist
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July 29, 2009 — The Real Unemployment Rate Hits [...]

A record 37.2 million people, or about one out of every eight Americans, received food stamps in September, as the recession drove a surging jobless rate, according to a government report.
Recipients of the subsidy for retail-food purchases climbed 18 percent from a year earlier, according to a statement posted today on the U.S. Department of [...]

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said in an interview with Reuters home prices will resume their decline by early next year as foreclosure sales pick up again.
“The housing crash is not over,” he said.
The U.S. housing market has suffered the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and its impact [...]

The default rate for commercial mortgages in the US climbed to a fresh 16-year high in the third quarter of this year, as the property market continued to struggle under the weight of tight credit and falling rents.
During the third quarter the commercial default rate rose from 2.88 per cent to 3.4 per cent, the [...]

Food banks across the country are undergoing a high-tech revolution, adopting sophisticated databases, bar coding, GPS tracking, automated warehouses and other technologies used in the food industry that increasingly supplies their goods.
It’s a long way from handing out macaroni and canned soup from a church basement.

Source/Full Story:  Yahoo! News
Related Items

November 19, 2009 — Experts [...]

Gold is at a new high this morning, @ 1,165.96
Visitors to America might have noticed the television ads urging us to buy gold. One such “spokesman”, formerly in charge of managing the government’s hoard of the yellow stuff, including the ingots buried at Fort Knox, points out that the value of gold has never fallen [...]

…So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs [...]

What economic challenges are still ahead? I thought the economy was recovering, and green shoots abound.
US unemployment surged above 10 per cent for the first time in more than a quarter of a century in October, increasing political pressure on the Obama administration.
According to figures revealed on Friday, the unemployment rate rose to 10.2 [...]

Full Story/Source: Reuters
U.S. job losses fell to their lowest level in a year last month, but the unemployment rate jumped to a 26-year high, painting a mixed picture of an economic recovery hindered by weakness in the labor market.
The Labor Department said on Friday the jobless rate climbed to 9.7 percent in August, the [...]

U.S. home loans failed at a record pace in July despite ongoing federal and state programs to avoid foreclosures, which have severely strained housing and the economy.

Foreclosure activity jumped 7 percent in July from June and 32 percent from a year earlier as one in every 355 households with a loan got a foreclosure filing, [...]

When those adjustments are taken into account for May 2009, the unemployment rate soars to 16.4%. That is the highest rate since the BLS began calculating the U-6 rate in 1994. While not exactly comparable, it is also higher than the BLS’s earlier and yet broader adjusted unemployment rate called the U-7. The BLS began [...]

When those adjustments are taken into account for May 2009, the unemployment rate soars to 16.4%. That is the highest rate since the BLS began calculating the U-6 rate in 1994. While not exactly comparable, it is also higher than the BLS’s earlier and yet broader adjusted unemployment rate called the U-7. The BLS began [...]

Confidence in the world economy dropped for the first time in four months in July as government stimulus efforts showed little sign of reducing unemployment, a Bloomberg survey of users on six continents showed.

The Bloomberg Professional Global Confidence Index declined to 39.13 in July from 43.57 in June. A reading below 50 means pessimists outnumber [...]

 
Vice President Joe Biden said the Obama administration “misread how bad the economy was” but stands by its stimulus package and believes the plan will create more jobs as the pace of its spending picks up.
Biden, in an interview airing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” said the nation’s 9.5 percent unemployment rate is “much too [...]

Stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic tumbled on Thursday as investors took fright at a bigger-than-expected fall in US jobs last month that dashed hopes the recession was all but over in the world’s biggest economy.
The data showed that the number of people in employment fell 467,000 in June and the unemployment rate [...]

California’s unemployment rate climbed to 11.5 percent in May, the highest in modern record-keeping, the California Employment Development Department reported today. Sacramento County unemployment was at 11.1 percent in May, up from April’s 10.8 percent.
Nonfarm payrolls numbers statewide dropped by another 68,900 for the month. That’s roughly the same rate of job losses as in [...]

Bank stress tests should be repeated if the U.S. unemployment rate rises beyond levels assumed by regulators in a recent round of examinations that provided relief to markets, according to a report released by a bailout watchdog panel on Tuesday.
The Congressional Oversight Panel said in the report that the stress tests should also be repeated [...]

With companies in no mood to hire, the unemployment rate jumped to 9.4 percent in May, the highest in more than 25 years. But the pace of layoffs eased, with employers cutting 345,000 jobs, the fewest since September.
The much smaller-than-expected reduction in payroll jobs, reported by the Labor Department on Friday, adds to evidence that [...]

The weak labor market is hurting U.S. cities — centers of many industries and large housing markets — with 93 metropolitan areas registering an unemployment rate of at least 10 percent in April, according to Labor Department data released on Wednesday.
That is more than 13 times the number of cities that notched the same high [...]

The weak labor market is hurting U.S. cities — centers of many industries and large housing markets — with 93 metropolitan areas registering an unemployment rate of at least 10 percent in April, according to Labor Department data released on Wednesday.
That is more than 13 times the number of cities that notched the same high [...]

Unemployment in California shot to 11.2% in March, the highest level since the state began keeping records. What’s more, the number of people out of work for almost a year rose by 9.4%, and has now doubled in the last 12 months.
Carpenter Luiz Vasquez knows the frustration all too well. In the last year, he [...]

The global economic crisis will hit jobs hard, with unemployment set to reach double digits in many developing and advanced countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Sunday.
“By the end of 2010 the unemployment rate could be approaching double digit figures in all G8 countries with the sole exception of Japan, [...]

Source:  FOXNews.com
After the Labor Department reported the nation’s unemployment rate bolted to 8.1 percent in February, the U.S. workforce will likely face another major challenge – stagnant, or even falling wages, Reuters reported.
Labor experts say that after landing a new job, workers can expect lower pay because the downturn doesn’t show signs of improving in [...]

Source: Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Job losses in the United States likely accelerated last month and the unemployment rate probably surged to a 25-year high as recession-hit companies took drastic steps to cut costs, according to economists.
They reckon that the U.S. economy, reeling from the worst financial crisis since the 1930s and stuck in recession [...]

Source: bizjournals.com
The Buffalo-Niagara Falls labor market suffered a loss of 6,100 private-sector jobs in the last year while joblessness rose to its highest point in nearly two decades.
The state Department of Labor reported the unemployment rate jumped to 9 percent last month, compared with 6.3 percent in January 2008 and 7.1 percent in December. According to [...]

Source: NYTimes.com
The trends, based on an analysis of new state data collected by The New York Times, raise questions about how well a revamped welfare system with great state discretion is responding to growing hardships.
Michigan cut its welfare rolls 13 percent, though it was one of two states whose October unemployment rate topped 9 percent. [...]