keep playing stupid, WH, it suits you
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keep playing stupid, WH, it suits you
Are you even paying attention?
Your posts here reflect zero familiarity with the topic.
so do you guys approve another spending handout from the govt?
The problem is, it's not free. It's damn expensive to be productive here, that's why we get productivity from cheaper places.Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
The US will never be able to compete with sweatshop/low-wage countries like China, India. The only hope is that foreign salaries rise.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wild Cobra
I read an article where a huge Indian out source company is now looking to hire US people. :lol
The tech companies have been bitching about visas for years because they can't import enough cheap, unmarried Indians who live 5 to an apartment vs US engineers who have a house and family. The US engineers know exactly what kind of scam US tech employers (Intel, MS, etc) are trying to pull off by demanding big increases the quote of tech visas.
Why Cheaper Money Won't Mean More Jobs
Robert Reich
Can the Fed rescue the economy by making money even cheaper than it already is? A debate is being played out in the Fed about whether it should return to so-called "quantitative easing" -- buying more mortgage-backed securities, Treasury bills, and other bonds -- in order to lower the cost of capital still further.
The sad reality is that cheaper money won't work. Individuals aren't borrowing because they're still under a huge debt load. And as their homes drop in value and their jobs and wages continue to disappear, they're not in a position to borrow. Small businesses aren't borrowing because they have no reason to expand. Retail business is down, construction is down, even manufacturing suppliers are losing ground.
That leaves large corporations. They'll be happy to borrow more at even lower rates than now -- even though they're already sitting on mountains of money.
But this big-business borrowing won't create new jobs. To the contrary, large corporations have been investing their cash to pare back their payrolls. They've been buying new factories and facilities abroad (China, Brazil, India), and new labor-replacing software at home.
If Bernanke and company make it even cheaper to borrow, they'll be unleashing a third corporate strategy for creating more profits but fewer jobs -- mergers and acquisitions.
The M&A wave has already started. Continental and United Airlines just got approval to merge. Biotech giant Genzyme is on the auction block after Sanofi-Aventis announced a $18.5 billion bid. On Friday, 3Par, a data storage company, accepted a $1.8 billion takeover offer from Dell -- one day after Hewlett-Packard raised its offer. Campbell's Soup is eying parts of United Biscuits, BHP Billiton has put in a takeover bid for Potash, Oracle or H-P are likely to pay up to $1.5 billion for security software maker ArcSight. Bain Capital is expected to acquire Air Medical Group for almost $1 billion. The insurance industry is headed for the biggest merger boom in recent history.
Who wins from all this? If history is a guide, shareholders of acquired companies do better than shareholders of companies doing the acquiring. Top executives who end up running bigger corporations get fatter pay packages. And Wall Street and big-name corporate law firms who engineer the M&As reap a bundle.
Who loses? Large numbers of ordinary workers will lose their jobs. After all, the purpose M&As is to create greater economies of scale and more "synergies." Translated: More pink slips.
Last week in Jackson Hole, Ben Bernanke insisted the Fed will do what's necessary to increase consumer and business spending in order to keep the economy growing. But cheaper money won't necessarily create the kind of spending that generates more jobs. In fact, right now it's having the opposite effect. When consumers and small businesses can't and won't borrow more, big businesses use cheap money to bid up the prices of corporate assets and cut payrolls.
What we need now is more jobs, not bigger corporations.
The other scam the financial sector has going is borrowing at 0.5% or 0% and then buying t-bills at 3%, and pocketing millions in guaranteed, no-risk spread of 2%.
Bullshit.Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
Sure, we cannot compete for the small things that a shipping container holds thousands or millions of. Still, why are we buying large, heavy items from them like steel, sheetrock, etc. It's because we business cannot compete from a cost of production standpoint, and there is so much more in production costs than labor. regulations, fees, taxes, and insurances that business here must pay that they don't over there. Changing our taxation to a consumption based tax system from our production based tax system would do us so much good overall.
Talking out your ass again?Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
I worked with an engineer from India a few years ago. Have you worked with any?
Yep.Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
These same people who want unions to protect them for being inefficient and lazy should worry that employers want someone who will work an honest day for an honest wage.
Wages are stickier than ever.
Thing I don't get is: if you're unemployed isn't being underpaid and underemployed better than having no job at all ?
Let capitalism pay us like illegals under the table again? Yes or not?
When 8-9% unemployment assumes a structural pose, you have to ask yourself this question.
One amazing fact about the financial bust that followed WWI: McKinley insisted successfully on wage flexibility. Somehow, the unions saw the necessity too.
Quote:
What a difference 90 years makes.
I'm fairly sure a large number of free agents are pondering just this sort of bargain.Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
Quote:
What can I do for money?
Yes, but they have no one to lend it to in a declining market.Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
So they just save it as reserves to meet the accentuated risk profile of their portfolios.
Relatively speaking, small banks are lending more, but they're relatively more connected to their communities. That's something you can't fake.
(Disclosure: WH23 is a credit union user.)
I would think so, and I have resorted to minimum wage jobs at least three times in my life now.Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...phic-popup.jpg
With the country focused on job growth and with unemployment continuing to hover above 9 percent, comparatively little attention has been paid to the quality of the jobs being created and what that might say about the opportunities available to workers when the recession finally settles. There are reasons for concern, however, even in the early stages of a tentative recovery that now appears to be barely wheezing along.
For years, long before the recession began, job growth had become increasingly polarized in this country. High-paid occupations that require significant amounts of education and training grew rapidly alongside low-wage, service-type jobs that do not, according to David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The growth of these low-wage jobs began in the 1980s, accelerated in the 1990s and began to really take off in the 2000s. Losing out in the shuffle, Dr. Autor said, were jobs that he described as “middle-skill, middle-wage” — entry-level white-collar positions, like office and administrative support work, and certain blue-collar jobs, like assembly line workers and machine operators.
The recession appears to have magnified that trend, Dr. Autor wrote in a recent paper, released jointly by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning policy group, and the Hamilton Project, which has a more centrist reputation. From 2007 to 2009, the paper said, there was relatively little net change in total employment for both high-skill and low-skill occupations, while employment plummeted in so-called middle-skill occupations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/us...gewanted=print
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Meanwhile, CEOs who fire the most people pocket the biggest incomes
"The CEOs of the 50 firms that have laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis took home nearly $12 million on average in 2009, 42% more than their peers at S&P 500 firms, according to CEO Pay and the Great Recession, the 17th in a series of annual Executive Excess reports from the progressive think tank.
Combined, the CEOs at those 50 firms made $598 million and laid off 531,363 workers -- accounting for more than three quarters of the 697,448 announced layoffs at the top 500 firms. The study also found that 72% of them announced their mass layoffs during periods of positive earnings reports, and that those companies enjoyed a 44% profit increase in 2009.
"These numbers all reflect a broader trend in Great Recession-era Corporate America: the relentless squeezing of worker jobs, pay, and benefits to boost corporate earnings and maintain corporate executive paychecks at their recent bloated levels," the study authors said.
See full article from DailyFinance: http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/co...here_copyright
"
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/co...more/19616517/
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I'm sure the Repugs, always on the lookout for "moral hazards" that might be created for the poor, NEVER are bothered by the moral hazard of CEOs increasing profits and their paychecks/bonuses by job destruction.
The only problem with that is that if you're making, say 70K a year, and you take a job at 40K a year, that 40K employer won't be too happy if a 70K job opens up and you jump at it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
I'm not sure that's a moral hazard so much as an expedience in tough times. Companies have to survive the downturn so they get lean. What they shed is people. Would you outlaw that?
My main is a credit union, though I have money in a few banks too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
Oh, and WH, offtopic but....
I'M OLD GREEEEEEEEEEEG!