FedUpUSA

Archive for December 16th, 2009

In a long-term assessment of employment data released last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics surveyed the country’s jobs landscape and developed a picture of how it’s likely to evolve over the next ten years.

As the population ages and manufacturing jobs wane, much of the next decade’s employment growth is expected to be in service industries — such as health care services or business services — which are projected to make up a whopping 96% of the increase in new employment.

But if some industries flourish in the new economy, others are likely to deteriorate — and slash jobs. And in the report, the government pointed to ten struggling industries that it says are likely to hemorrhage the most jobs in the next decade.

Did your industry make the list? Check them out below:
LINK HERE

Detroit’s Unemployment Rate Is Nearly 50%, According to the Detroit News
LINK HERE

Best Shanty-Based Service Businesses For A Great Depression
LINK HERE

Jon Stewart’s take on the bank CEOs missing the meeting with President Obama …

Click here if the embed doesn’t work.

I have long maintained that the EU Zone is an absolute train wreck – that their banks have less transparency and more leverage than ours, and have recognized less of their total losses.

As such they are literally dancing with jugs of nitroglycerine.

Well, now Bloomberg pipes up with this:

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) — European Central Bank officials are moving closer to forcing banks to provide more information about the collateral they give the ECB in return for loans.

What? 

You mean the ECB doesn’t have full information about the paper they took in as collateral for loans?  What could they possibly want to know?

Under the terms of the collateral consultation, officials want banks to provide information about individual loans such as the value of the property backing a mortgage, details on cash flow and whether the borrower is in arrears, the people said.

WHAT?!

You have to be kidding me.  The ECB is holding paper as collateral where they don’t even know if the borrower is making the payments – that is, whether THE LOAN HAS DEFAULTED OR NOT?

The ECB has already tightened the rules for asset-backed securities it accepts as the central bank moves toward unwinding its emergency liquidity measures. The ECB said Nov. 20 it wants to ensure “high credit standards” are met and aims to restore “the proper functioning of the ABS market.”

Like hell.

I warned you all several times about this crap.  Now it’s leaking into the mainstream media…… which means that beyond the walls of the ECB it is now common knowledge.

How long before you see this?

PS: There’s more where this Ticker came from – this one is a tease for tomorrow….. To those who said the Euro Zone would be ok, I have only one phrase for you: “I told you so!”  

It was just a matter of time before the administration’s covert plan of rewarding bank execs for massive failure by allowing them to load up their balance sheets with record risk once again, while paying out historic bonuses, blew up in Larry Summers’ face. Today’s attempt by the government to not only allow the failed Citi management team to pay itself an infinite amount of money more than it deserves for destroying one of America’s landmark companies (why the hell is Vikram Pandit still in charge of the Titanic?) but to pretend that it “generated” another taxpayer win by selling off its shares at a profit, was aborted after hours, when Citi could barely find enough interest to sell $17 billion at the embarrassingly low price of $3.15, below that government’s cost basis. This will preclude Obama from making a TV appearance tomorrow of how the US taxpayer made even more money by backstopping Moral Hazard. What the US taxpayer however did do, is funnel money straight out of its pocket, into that of Vikram’s worthless lackeys. We somehow doubt this will make the teleprompter of whatever it is Obama will be praising in his TeeVeethon tomorrow.

More from the WSJ:

The U.S. government reversed plans to begin reducing its trimming its 34% stake in Citigroup Inc. (C) after investors balked at buying the bank’s shares, according to people familiar with the situation.

Citigroup was nearing completion late Wednesday on the sale of about $17 billion of newly issued shares. But the offering encountered such a lukewarm response that Treasury Department officials decided to hold off on selling any of its shares until next year, these people said.

At the expected sale price of $3.15 a share, the U.S. government would have suffered a loss of 10 cents per share on its 7.7 billion-share stake in Citigroup, or about $770 million.

Treasury officials also agreed not to sell the government’s shares for at least 90 days. The 90-day lockup is a significant concession because the government previously could sell its Citigroup shares whenever it wanted.

Citigroup said Wednesday evening that it plans to go forward with repaying the financial lifelines it got under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. That includes unwinding a deal in which the government shields Citigroup from most losses on $301 billion of assets held by the company.

As Citigroup gauged interest in its huge offering, announced Monday, some investors said they were willing to buy shares only if the company extracted an agreement from the Treasury Department to hold off on any future stock sales for at least 90 days, according to people familiar with the matter.

The government now plans to unload its Citigroup stock gradually over the next 12 months, people familiar with the situation said. That is a major shift from the Treasury Department’s announcement Monday that it planned to dispose of the shares over six to 12 months.

Is this merely one of the ever increasing cracks in the economic team’s bailout plan, which as all investors are fully aware are completely unsustainable in the long run, yet sufficiently plausible over the next 90 or so days (until QE presumably ends) that one more day of buying by various algos may be warranted. Perhaps the 90 days will end up being a far too optimistic expectation.

How does the unemployment rate decrease even as more jobs are lost? Easy – just don’t count those that stopped looking for work and viola! Good news all around. Except that this is kind of like Enron accounting. Nor are those that went back to school counted. Nor are those that took part-time jobs just to survive. In fact, it’s not like Enron accounting, it IS Enron accounting. ‘Hide the decline’ as it were. From the Detroit News: Michigan jobless rate falls to 14.7%

Michigan’s jobless rate in November fell to 14.7, from 15.1 in October, state labor officials said today. The U.S. unemployment rate in November dipped by two-tenths of a percentage point to 10 percent.

The state’s November rate was its lowest since May.

The Michigan Department of Energy, Labor & Economic Growth said total employment increased by 16,000 in November while unemployment fell by 20,000. The state’s labor force edged down by 4,000 over the month.

DING, DING, DING!!!! So Michigan still lost net jobs, even as the official unemployment number decreased. Hmmm. How come that aspect was buried in the article? Oh that’s right – a Democrat is governor, and that means all is well now. Groan… Thus begs the logical question: if our population is decreasing, jobs are still being lost, tax revenues are down as a result, and inflation was negative last year, why is the state budget continually increasing??

2003 Total Budget: $38,546,223,200
2004 Total Budget: $39,236,530,900
2005 Total Budget: $40,224,217,400
2006 Total Budget: $41,672,547,100
2007 Total Budget: $42,791,804,000
2008 Total Budget: $43,827,383,200
2009 Total Budget: $44,500,000,000 (approx)

Funny how liberal math works out sometimes.Well, not so funny right now in fact…

The on-again, off-again drive to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws moved back to Congress on Tuesday with the introduction of legislation that would open a path to legal status for millions of illegal immigrants.

The bill, introduced by Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois, was seen as the opening volley in what Democrats and Republicans expect to be a hard-fought battle. President Obama has pledged to take up the issue early next year; efforts to overhaul the laws during George W. Bush’s presidency failed despite the backing of Mr. Bush and some Republicans.

Mr. Gutierrez, one of Mr. Obama’s earliest Latino supporters in Congress, said in an interview that the bill reflected a growing impatience with the pace of immigration change among a coalition of Democratic lawmakers, immigrant advocates and labor and religious groups.
(snippet)
Representative Brian Bilbray, a California Republican who heads the House Immigration Reform Caucus, said the bill would only generate a new wave of migrants to compete with Americans for jobs at a time of 10 percent unemployment.
LINK HERE

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