2001-08-01

2001-08-02

2001-08-03

2001-08-03
_Weekly Economic Letter_
Leading economic indicators are sending strong recovery signals (pdf)

2001-08-20
Denise Dubie _Network World_
Tony & Jackie Brown release _The First Canary: The InSide Story of Ruby Ridge and a Decade of Cover-Up_

2001-08-04

2001-08-05

2001-08-06

2001-08-06
_USA Today_/_Reuters_
Job Cut Announcements Jump 65% in July

2001-08-06
_Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal_
July sees largest lay-off total
Industry Standard
"In the 8 years his company has been keeping track of major lay-offs, John Challenger says there has never been as many jobs cut in a single month as in July.   Companies in July announced plans to cut 205,975 jobs, the out-placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas says today.   The July numbers pushed the 2001 total to 983,337, which is 200K more than the largest annual total tracked by Challenger.   The old record was 677,795 in 1998.   The July figure is 65% higher than the 124,852 lay-offs announced in June and 222% more than the 63,967 recorded in 2000 July.   July was the sixth month this year with 100K or more job cuts.   Only May failed to reach that level, coming in at 80,140.   'Job cuts tell us as much about the economy's future as they do about the present.', Mr. Challenger says.   'Companies are looking at their staffing needs for the balance of 2001 and the numbers do not present a very positive picture.   If companies were anticipating a 2001 turn-around, with an increase in demand for goods and services, we would not be witnessing the extraordinary number of job cuts that are taking place this year.'   Telecommunications, computer and electronics make up 3 of the top 5 job-cutting industries to date in 2001.   Among the 3 sectors, 358,375 lay-offs have been announced.   The other 2 industries in the top 5 are automotive and industrial goods, which have recorded 171,685 job cuts since January.   These 5 industries alone account for 54% of the total so far this year, Mr. Challenger says."

2001-08-07

2001-08-07
Shawn Hubler _LA Times_ pg A1
Jobless but Busy, Busy, Busy; Once flying high on the technology boom, laid-off young professionals throw themselves into coping
"In the Bay Area, where almost 19% of workers have bet their careers on the tech sector, the laid-off can now choose from a wide array of consolations.   There's Tuesday group therapy for job hunters, hosted by a San Francisco social worker at $15 a session.   There's a Wednesday idled-techie support group in Cupertino, hosted by a career counselor who, when the...
Now I'm 30 years old, I have no job, I haven't had a date in months; I mean, who'd want to date me?...   I mean, my relatives have been great, but -- look, I had my *own* apartment.   I'll probably have to sell my Passat next.
'You have to understand.', 32-year-old new media worker from San Jose confided...   'This is the longest I've gone without any offers in, like 8 years.   It used to be I could pick up the phone & call a friend & -- boom -- I'd have a job.   I've had my resume out there for 4 months, & there's just been nothing.   And 5 years ago, I was a millionaire on paper.   If I hadn't been laid off before my shares vested, I'd be retired now.   That does something to a person.' IOW, it has suddenly gotten scary out there."

2001-08-07
Lisa Girion _LATimes_ pg C1
Announced Job Cuts at Record High
"Corporate misery spiked in July as US companies, led by the telecommunications & computer sectors, announced plans to cut 205,975 jobs -- a 65% increase over June & more than 3 times as many as a year ago...   It brings the total announced job cuts for 2001 to 983,337, far ahead of the 677,795 announced cuts in 1998, the previous record."

2001-08-08

2001-08-09

2001-08-10

2001-08-10
_Recruiting Industry NewsWire_
Christian & Timbers Study Finds Executive Resumes up 273%
Recruiter's Week
"Resumes from top executives have risen 273% and almost tripled in the first 6 months of 2001, compared to the same period a year ago...   'We have received 3,993 resumes so far in 2001, compared to 1,070 for the first 6 months of last year.', notes Bob Lambert, managing director of the firm's Southern California operations...   'Some of the resumes we've received are from executives who, if it weren't for the turbo-charged growth rate of the dot.com markets, would never have been given executive titles at all.'"

2001-08-11

2001-08-12

2001-08-12 00:46:22PDT (03:46:22EDT) (97:46:22GMT)
_Chaos Reigns_
lay-offs
"Thursday 8/2, 7 people were laid off from where I work - 5 techs, 1 development project manager, and 1 sales executive assistant.   I've heard of a number of other people in my field getting laid off locally recently.   It's concerning me."

2001-08-13

2001-08-14

2001-08-15

2001-08-15
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring e-News-Letter_
racism, age discrimination & displacement of US workers

2001-08-16

2001-08-17

2001-08-18

2001-08-18
Jonathan Peterson _LA Times_
Immigration Emphasis on Guest Visas
"The Bush administration's emphasis on increasing the supply of [cheap] temporary workers for US employers suggests it has abandoned, at least for now, a broader reform of immigration policy.   Indeed, administration officials already have conveyed to the Mexican government that an immigration strategy that relies strongly on a guest-worker program is more acceptable politically than an over-haul that leans more heavily toward..."

2001-08-19

2001-08-20

2001-08-20
Denise Dubie _Network World_
It's raining resumes
"Lots of resumes, and good ones at that.   Win Shih, 'IT' director at St. Louis University, says the school received 15 qualified applications in just one week in response to an entry-level IT position posted in June.   A year ago, it took 3-plus weeks to get that many good applications for a similar job...   Another hirer, Richard Glasburg, says he can now be 'more fussy about who I hire'.   But with employee retention high on his list of priorities, the director of data communications for the commonwealth of Massachusetts has to be particularly selective...   Despite the swollen pool of candidates -- out-placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports that nearly 1M job cuts were announced in the U.S. through July -- Glasburg is still [claiming to be] struggling to find people with the right mix of technical and management expertise."

2001-08-20
Peter Brimelow & Edwin S. Rubenstein Forbes
L is for Lay-Offs
Extropy
"Does 'Hayek's Law' condemn the USA to a Japanese-like L-shaped recession?...   Houses are still being built and cars are selling well.   But whole industries, including capital goods, advertising and telecom, are in their own recession.   Lay-offs in June totaled 125K; company after company reports billion-dollar losses...   The low personal savings rate, which sank to -1.3% in early 2001.   Capital gains financed spending.   But now many investors have capital losses.   The high tax burden.   The combined federal, state and local take was 32.6% of GDP in 2000, significantly above the World War II high of 30.8%.   The high debt burden.   Business debt is 64.4% of GDP, up from 53.4% in 1994; interest on mortgage and consumer debt now consumes a near-record 14.3% of disposable income...   excessive or misallocated investment ('malinvestment') is at the heart of a business-cycle theory that, at the time of the Great Depression, was a serious competitor with Keynesianism.   Named after the birth-place of its 2 major proponents, Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek [Eugen Boehm-Bawerk, & Carl Menger], 'Austrian Economics' has attracted new attention with the discrediting of Keynesianism -- and with the unusual characteristics of this post-boom economy.   'The world economies have struggled this year in accordance with Hayek's Law.', says Mark Skousen, an occasional FORBES contributor and editor of the Austrian-oriented financial newsletter Forecasts & Strategies.   'Hayek's Law states that the economy takes a long time to recover after an unsustainable boom (1995-99).   The excesses of the previous boom create an investment structure that cannot be easily dismantled and transferred to new uses.' It's news to modern Austrian economists that Hayek had a law.   But they do see a point to Skousen's coinage...   Roger W. Garrison, economics professor at Auburn University and an adjunct scholar at the independent Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, AL.   'The artificiality of the boom probably dates to early 1996, when the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates even though the unemployment rate was at or near its 'natural', or 'full-employment' level.   The misallocations of the late 1990s entailed over-investments in future-oriented and highly speculative projects -- dot-coms and the like.'   Garrison also notes that the economy, ominously, seems no longer to be all that responsive to Federal Reserve stimulation.   'All these features are consistent with Hayek's theory.', he says."

2001-08-21

2001-08-21 08:40PDT (11:40EDT) (15:40GMT)
_BBC_
Q&A: What caused the US slow-down?
"Unlike some previous recessions, the current USA slow-down seems to have been caused not by reluctant consumers, but by a sudden slump in company spending.   During the boom years, many USA firms invested heavily in information technology systems.   Overall investment grew by nearly 20% each year, helping companies boost productivity and achieve higher output with fewer workers.   Much of this was financed by borrowing.   But these investments were based on very optimistic forecasts for USA economic growth.   But when the dot-com bubble on the stock-markets burst, and some experts began to down-grade their optimistic forecasts, companies realised that they needed to cut back on their investment."
NBER says recession that troughed in 2001 April ended 2001 November.   The stock market crashed 2000-03-10.   The STEM job markets were already diving by 2000 September, and general job markets in mid-2001.   STEM product sales were tanking all through 2001 and 2002.   Job markets still had not fully recovered by the end of 2016.

2001-08-22

2001-08-22
Dalia Sussman _abc_
Poll: Sentiment Teeters
"Public ratings of the national economy are their worst since 1997 April.   52% of Americans now say the economy's in bad shape, a number that's soared by 23 points this year and by 32 points since 2000 January.   It has been much worse, though: In late 1991 a near-unanimous 93% rated the economy negatively."

2001-08-23

2001-08-24

2001-08-25

2001-08-26

2001-08-27

2001-08-27
David Plotnikoff _Knight Ridder_ pg C1
Job-Seeking Dot-Commers Find the Gold Old Days Are No More... and never were
"Monster.com, the Net's #1 career site, had 16.8M registered job-seekers in [2001] July, up from 8M in 2000 July.   Monster currently lists 11.5M resumes in its data base, up from 4M a year ago.   At Headhunter.net, there were 35M searches by job-hunters in May, up from 18M in February.   The average job posting was looked at 110 times in May, up from 85 in February.   Longer job searches -- 5 or 10 times as long as last year, in some cases -- are the rule across almost all industries...   On Hotjobs, tech positions, which make up about a quarter of job postings, are down 32% from this time last year.   Those searching for tech jobs are up 204%...   the tech talent, which began to be noticeable on the service in December.   The company has hired more than 30 people in June & July...   'Now we're charry-picking great people with the exact experience we're looking for.'...   Ron Self, president & COO of Headhunter.net, said he's seen no marked change in mind-set among job-seekers...."

2001-08-28

2001-08-28
Thane Peterson _BusinessWeek_
Take a Break, and the Rest is Easy
"According to the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, the average American worker now logs nearly 2K hours on the job per year, 4% more than in 1980.   The only places where people work longer hours are developing countries like Hong Kong, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand...
  In every other industrial nation, the average work-week has been going in a more reasonable direction: down.   In Japan, for instance, the average annual hours worked fell to 1,889 hours in 1997, down 10.9% since 1980.   In Canada, the average has fallen by a full week, to 1,732 hours per year.   Workers now log an average of 1,656 work hours annually in France and 1,560 in Germany.   My idols are Norwegian workers, who put in an annual average of only 1,399 hours on the job, almost one-third less than [a little more than two-thirds of the hours worked per year by] Americans...
  According to The State of Working America 2000-01, a study made last year by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, the average middle-class American husband and wife worked 3,885 hours in 1998, an increase since 1989 of 247 hours...   The average African-American middle-class family worked 4,278 hours in 1998..."

2001-08-28
Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chris Hartman & Betsy Leondar-Wright
Institute for Policy Studies
United for a Fair Economy press release (pdf)
United for a Fair Economy (pdf)
Key Findings:

The 1990s: A Decade of Greed
• [Average] Executive pay jumped 571% between 1990 and 2000 (before adjusting for inflation).   [Average] CEO pay rose even in 2000, a year in which the S&P 500 suffered a 10% loss.
• The explosion in CEO pay over the decade dwarfed the 37% growth in worker pay, which barely out-paced inflation,at 32%.   According to Business Week CEO pay now stands at 531 times the pay of the average worker.
• If the average annual pay for production workers had grown at the same rate since 1990 as it has for CEOs, their 2000 annual earnings would have been $120,491 instead of $24,668.
• If the minimum wage, which stood at $3.80 an hour in 1990, had grown at the same rate as CEO pay over the decade, it would now be $25.50 an hour, rather than the current $5.15 an hour.
1. Lay-Off Leaders Win, Workers Lose
   • CEOs of firms that announced lay-offs of 1K or more workers this year earned about 80% more, on average, than executives at 365 top firms surveyed by _Business Week_.   The lay-off leaders earned an average of $23.7M in total compensation in 2000, compared with a $13.1M average for executives as a whole.
   • The top job-cutters received an increase in salary and bonus of nearly 20% in 2000, compared to average raises in that year for U.S.wage workers of about 3% and for salaried employees of 4%.

2001-08-29

2001-08-29
_USA Today_
Some Firms ReHire Laid-Off Employees

2001-08-29
Michael Mahoney _CNN_/_eCommerce Times_/_CIO Today_/_News Factor_
Dot-Com Job Cuts Fall to 12-Month Low
Tech News World
"On the one hand, dot-com lay-offs in August fell 44% from July, to reach a 12-month low of 4,899.   On the other, the number of dot-com firms that permanently closed up shop leaped 133% in August, with 21 companies calling it quits...   So far this year, 248 dot-com firms have closed.   Since January, dot-coms have announced 87,795 job cuts, more than double the number of cuts announced in all of 2000 (41,515)."

2001-08-29
Michelle Zelsman _IT World_/_InfoWorld_/_IDG_
The economics of H-1Bs and lay-offs
"One reason INS is not confident of projections as to when the cap might be reached is that the frequency with which H-1B petitions have been filed has fluctuated greatly -- with a high of 57,836 petitions, or 18.3% of the cap in 2000 December, and a low of 15,724, or 5% filed in 2001 February."
 

2001-08-30

2001-08-30
_USA Today_
Can Kozmo.com Survive?

2001-08-31

2001-08-30 23:07PDT (2001-08-31 02:07EDT) (2001-08-31 06:07GMT)
Porter Anderson _CNN_
US employees put in most hours
"In hard numbers, what Johnson is saying is that his ILO statistics show that last year the average American worked 1,978 hours -- up from 1,942 hours in 1990.   That represents an increase of almost a week of work.   And it registers Americans as working longer hours than Canadians, Germans, Japanese and other workers...   Johnson calculates that the worldwide labor force stands today at nearly 3G people -- roughly half the planetary population.   Of that large group, the agency estimates that 160M workers are unemployed.   About 41% of the unemployed pool, about 66M, are thought to be younger people...   Between 1995 and 2000, the average annual labor productivity growth rate in the United States was 2.6%, up from 0.8% between 1990 and 1995.   Within the European Union, the labor productivity growth rate was 2.4% from 1990 to 1995.   It decelerated to 1.2% from 1995 to 2000."

2001-08-30 23:07PDT (2001-08-31 02:07EDT) (2001-08-31 06:07GMT)
Porter Anderson _CNN_
U.S. employees put in most hours
"Europeans' comparatively long vacations -- 4 to 6 weeks per worker -- may have something to do with this.   'Maybe they're not so stressed' as American workers, who on the average may get 2 weeks' vacation...   in the French work-place where a 35-hour week is the legislated standard...
  last year the average American worked 1,978 hours -- up from 1,942 hours in 1990.   That represents an increase of almost a week of work.   And it registers Americans as working longer hours than Canadians, Germans, Japanese & other workers...   the average Australian, Canadian, Japanese or Mexican worker was on the job roughly 100 hours less than the average American in a year -- that's almost two-and-a-half weeks less.   Brazilians and British employees worked some 250 hours, or more than five weeks, less than Americans.   Germans worked roughly 500 hours, or 12-and-a-half weeks, less than careerists in the States.
  Of countries classified as 'developing' or 'in transition', only South Korea & the Czech Republic tracked workers putting in more hours than American laborers.   The Koreans logged almost 500 hours more annually than Americans, the Czechs doing some 100 hours more work than U.S. workers on average...
  'Since the mid-1990s, U.S. labor productivity has grown considerably faster than most other developed (industrialized) economies.', says Johnson.   'Between 1995 and 2000, the average annual labor productivity growth rate in the United States was 2.6%, up from 0.8% between 1990 and 1995.   Within the European Union, the labor productivity growth rate was 2.4% from 1990 to 1995.   It decelerated to 1.2% from 1995 to 2000.'... The well-documented new productivity of Ireland -- 7% growth in productivity in terms of value added per person employed -- is a story of almost non-existent unemployment...   'earnings increased for occupations demanding more formal education -- computer programming, accounting, nursing and teaching.'"

2001 Summer
John L. Duoba _CCH Business Owner's ToolKit_
Record Bankruptcies Signal Changes To Come
"New bankruptcy filings during the second quarter of 2001 (April 1 - June 30) rose nearly 25% over the same period a year ago, according to data released 2001 August 24, by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI), a non-partisan advocacy organization.   Filings increased from 321,729 to 400,394, making it the highest three-month filing period ever in U.S. history.   Moreover, bankruptcy filings are now on pace to surpass the record-breaking year of 1998, when 1,442,549 new cases were filed.   Through the first 6 months of 2001, 767,235 cases have been filed, a 21% increase over the first half of last year, and 5.4% over 1998’s half-year mark."

_BigCharts.com_ S&P Retail Index
Note the signs of weakness shown in the dip from 1998 July through November, relatively flat 1999, and the drop all through 2000.

AAA southern California fuel prices
AAA national fuel prices
AAA state by state

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