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According to ADP, the largest payroll processer in the US, the total number of private sector jobs made up the net loss in the last official recession last month. In January 2008 the total number of jobs stood at 116.0 million in January 2008, falling to 107.2 million by February 2010. The net loss of 8.8 million jobs was finally regained in March 2014 when we hit 116.1 million total. That includes 491 thousand gained so far in 2014.
If that’s not a good reason for a party, what is?
The S&500, the broadest measure of stocks, hit a new high of 1884 today. The stock market celebrated by stopping trading for a moment to watch a debate on the future of the market unfold on CNBC.
It was a strange spectacle that also lit up twitter when IEX’s Brad Katsuyama took the challenge verbally shoved at him BATS Global Markets president William O’Brien and explained, in detail, how the market is rigged. Volume on the market noticeably dipped during the course of the debate and twitter lit up. It was a big moment in this history of the market.
The woman ahead of us in line at the convenience store had a bit more than the impatient, bored look we all shared. She held her head high and spoke to the cashier in a friendly tone, paying for the gasoline she was going to pump. Like many people at this store, in this part of St Paul, she paid with cash – but hers came in crisp twenties slid neatly out of a bank envelope. After we paid our own way out of the line I asked my daughter if she noticed. “My guess is she just cashed her paycheck because she doesn’t have a bank account,” I told her. It was a good guess, because it turns out that more than 17% of that particular neighborhood’s households have no bank account – and many rely on the UnBank check cashing up the street.
There are many reasons people don’t have bank accounts, up to and including the fact that check cashing stores can actually be cheaper than fees on everything. But some people wind up using these places for a “Payday Loan”, or a one-month advance on the next paycheck. A recent study shows that people who do this have to take out another loan the next month to pay off the first, and so on – with 62% eventually hitting 7 or more months in a row, the point where the interest payment exceeds the loan amount.
There is arguably no more powerful job in the world than Chair of the Federal Reserve. When Janet Yellen took the gig in February, it was only natural for a lot of words to be written wondering what kind of leader she would be. Betting money was on more of the same, given her long tenure at the bank.
With her first press conference behind her, we do indeed have more – of the same, yes, but so much more it’s not the same. Yellen brought forward a new transparency so open that it makes the breath of fresh air that as Bernanke rather stale in comparison. Perhaps it was time for a woman, after all, as Yellen is following in the developing tradition of female leaders as no-nonsense reformers.
Sad that the market is built on nonsense, then. The reaction so far has not exactly been good.
Are you ready for retirement? While the idea might have its appeal, especially with the winter weather making for long commutes this year, an awful lot of workers are not on a track to be able to retire. That’s according to a survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), conducted annually. They found that only 18% are “very confident” that they’ll have enough for retirement and a further 37% are “somewhat confident”. That’s up from the 2013 survey, in which only 13% was “very confident”.
The implications go beyond any one family’s ability to retire, however. The decline in workforce participation has been largely due to retirement since the start of 2011, and retirement opens jobs for young people. The wave of retirement that should accelerate after 2017 is one of the main reasons Barataria has hope for the 2020s. But is retirement nothing more than a dream for many workers today?
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Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 