News
CNN Money | Jobs report was bad. But not QE3 bad.
There was nothing good about the Good Friday jobs report. But was the slowdown in hiring in March bad enough for the Federal Reserve to once again consider more stimulus for the economy?
FOX Business | Sony to Cut 10K Jobs
Sony will slash 10,000 jobs, or about 6% of its workforce, according to reports, as the Japanese electronics maker moves forward with an overhaul that will help it return to profitability after four years of losses.
CNN Money | Obama's jobs countdown
The American economy only has to add another 740,000 jobs to get back to where it was in January 2009, when the president was sworn in.
NY Times | Federal Funds to Train the Jobless Are Drying Up
With the economy slowly reviving, an executive from Atlas Van Lines recently visited Louisville, Ky., with good news: the company wanted to hire more than 100 truck drivers ahead of the summer moving season.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Bloomberg | U.S. Employment Growth Seen Rebounding From Slump
The March setback in hiring will prove temporary as the U.S. economy, in its third year of expansion, now is better equipped to overcome a slowdown in Europe and rising fuel costs, economists said.
NBER | What explains high unemployment? The aggregate demand channel
A drop in aggregate demand driven by shocks to household balance sheets is responsible for a large fraction of the decline in U.S. employment from 2007 to 2009.
Heritage Foundation | Heritage Employment Report: March Report Mixed, on Balance Disappointing
The labor market made some gains in March, although the 120,000 new jobs were well below expectations of 200,000-plus. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also announced that the unemployment rate ticked down another tenth to 8.2 from 8.3 percent, largely due to rounding.
WSJ | James Bovard: The Wrong Way to Help the Disabled
The Obama administration is on the verge of compelling most of the largest corporations and universities, as well as many smaller businesses, to adopt a 7% hiring quota for disabled job applicants—lest they be debarred from doing business with the federal government. This radical personnel policy could raise costs and slash the productivity of almost 200,000 companies with U.S. government contracts.
Real Clear Markets | Obama's Employment "Hunger Game" Continues
The sickening crunch heard at 8:30 AM EST on Friday was the sound of the American Job Creation Express crashing into the brick wall of Obama's anti-investment economic policies. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that total employment (Household Survey) actually fell by 31,000 during March 2012.
Blogs
WSJ | Number of the Week: How Long Before Job Seekers Give Up?
21.4: The median number of weeks before someone unemployed leaves the labor force.
WSJ | Government Job Losses Flattening Out
The government sector has added 6,000 jobs through the first three months of this year, according to the Labor Department’s jobs report Friday. That’s a miniscule figure in a nation with 133 million non-farm jobs, but it marks a turning point for a crucial sector that has been cutting jobs for three years.
WSJ | Small, Medium-Sized Businesses Find Jobs Hard to Fill
The Institute for Supply Management-New York said this week that 20% of its members say the shortage of skilled labor is an obstacle to business. On Thursday, the National Federation of Independent Business reported a rising share of small business owners who say they have jobs that are hard to fill.
WSJ | Jobless Claims Keep Getting Revised Up
News Thursday that the U.S. Department of Labor revised upward its weekly initial jobless-claims number for the previous week didn’t cause much of a huge stir on financial markets, but it represented the latest in an unusual string of adjustments to the closely followed data.
