Free Republic

NORRISTOWN, Pa. (CBS) — A major pharmaceutical company is planning another round of layoffs that again will hit Montgomery County hard. On the heels of more than 650 job cuts at its West Point manufacturing and research plant in late 2013 and earlier this year, Merck plans to let go another 600 employees by the end of August. The company has already filed notices with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor which says the jobs are being cut in North Wales and Lansdale. County Commissioner Josh Shapiro is disappointed with the news, but says they’re working to help those affected.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sales of new U.S. homes plunged in June, a sign that real estate continues to be a weak spot in the economy. New home sales fell 8.1 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 406,000, the Commerce Department said Thursday. The report also revised down the May sales rate to 442,000 from 504,000. (snip)

Piketon , Ohio - Roughly 1400 people woke up to bad news Thursday morning. It's called a warn notice, and it means their livelihood is on the line. "These are the higher paying jobs in the area," Herman Potter said. But those jobs are now in jeopardy. Herman Potter is president of the Steel Workers Union in Piketon, Ohio. His employer, Fluor B&W issued a warn notice, stating layoffs are possible. Fluor B&W was hired by the Department of Energy to clean the former Portsmouth gaseous diffusion plant and re-industrialize the property three years ago. The way things stand now,...

1853, 1906, 1929, 1969, 1999 Pass the question around your office. Call your money manager and ask him or her, too. Post it on your office notice board. Give up? Those were the peaks of the five massive, generational stock-market bubbles in U.S. history. Investors who bought into stocks around those peaks ended up earning terrible returns over the subsequent 30 years. Forget “stocks for the long run.” They ended up with “stocks for a long face.” The bigger the bubble, the worse returns. And, according to a new research report, we are back there again. U.S. stocks are now...

Today’s jobs report was a very good one: 288,000 new jobs were created in June, and the unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent. So will Barack Obama get the credit? Probably not. First of all, we shouldn’t get too excited; there are still a lot of people looking for work, there are a lot who have gotten discouraged and dropped out of the labor force, and there are a lot working part time when they’d rather have full-time jobs.

This Independence Day weekend, drivers won't see any relief from high gas prices. Although prices retreated by a fraction of a cent at the beginning of the week, AAA predicts holiday travelers will pay the most at the pump since 2008. In its monthly gas price report released June 30, AAA said, "With Independence Day only a few days away, today's national average price of gas is $3.68 per gallon. This average is considerably more expensive than recent years for the holiday. The national average on July 4 in previous years was: $3.48 (2013); $3.34 (2012); $3.57 (2011); $2.74 (2010);...

The United States could soon become a large-scale Spain or Greece, teetering on the edge of financial ruin. That’s according to Donald Trump, who painted a very ugly picture of where this country is headed. Trump made the comments during a recent appearance on Fox News’ “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.” According to Trump, the United States is no longer a rich country. “When you’re not rich, you have to go out and borrow money. We’re borrowing from the Chinese and others. We’re up to $16 trillion in debt.” He goes on to point out that the downgrade...

A month ago we showed a chart that, in our humble opinion, summarized all that is wrong with the US housing market. The chart in question showed the April breakdown of existing home sales on a Y/Y basis by pricing bucket.   Needless to say, what the chart showed was the symptomatic, and schizophrenic, breakdown of US housing into two camps: the housing market for the 1%, those costing $750K and above, where the bulk of transactions are mostly between non-first time buyers, and typically take place as all cash transactions, and the market for "everyone else" which continues to...

Vice President Joseph R. Biden told a National Association of Manufacturers’ crowd this week that what the United States needed was more, not fewer, immigrants. Specifically, he called for a “constant, unrelenting stream” of new immigrants — “not dribbling [but] significant flows,” to bolster the national economy, The Hill reported.

Tyler Durden 05/30/2014Submitted by Jeff Nielsen via BullionBullsCanada blog, Regular readers are familiar with my narratives on the U.S. Greater Depression, and (in particular) some of the government’s own charts which depict this economic meltdown most vividly. The collapse in the “civilian participation rate” (the number of people working in the economy) and the “velocity of money” (the heartbeat of the economy) indicate an economy which is not merely in decline, but rather is being sucked downward in a terminal (and accelerating) death-spiral. However, even that previously published data, and the grim analyses which accompanied it could not prepare me...

May 26, 2014 - 06:47 AMBy: James Quinn The definition of death rattle is a sound often produced by someone who is near death when fluids such as saliva and bronchial secretions accumulate in the throat and upper chest. The person can’t swallow and emits a deepening wheezing sound as they gasp for breath. This can go on for two or three days before death relieves them of their misery. The American retail industry is emitting an unmistakable wheezing sound as a long slow painful death approaches. Death rattle It was exactly four months ago when I wrote THE RETAIL...

NORFOLK, Va.—With J.C. Penney Co. and Sears Holdings Corp. racing to close stores, America's weakest malls are being pushed to the brink. Nearly half of the 1,050 indoor and open air malls in the U.S. have both of those struggling chains as anchor tenants, according to real-estate research firm Green Street Advisors. Of those malls, nearly a quarter are struggling with sales below $300 per square foot and vacancy rates above 20%, meaning they will have a hard time finding new tenants if old ones leave. For an already-weakened mall industry, the negative turn for two once-reliable anchors is promising...

Here's a riddle: Many Republicans deny it's happening. Some Democrats don't want to talk about it. What is it? The answer is the growing U.S. economy, on pace to expand as much as 3.5 percent this year, about the best performance in the industrialized world. Unemployment has fallen from 10 percent to about 6.3 percent and consumer confidence is at a six-year high. Better economic data could help persuade voters in November to look past President Barack Obama's weak approval ratings and his unpopular healthcare law and give Democrats enough lift to hold onto the Senate and limit their losses...

It’s “Pomp and Circumstance” time for 1.6 million US college graduates. While members of the class of 2014 have some cause to celebrate, they also know they are a few short months away from starting to pay down their share of the $1 trillion-plus student-loan debt. The most shocking number of all is that only 17 percent of these soon-to-be grads have a job lined up, according to AfterCollege Inc., which crunches these numbers and also tries to help match employers with recent graduates. Despite our being a year further along on the road to economic recovery, this year’s 17...

Parents have more options as overeducated young people turn to baby-sitting. Ashley Newhall of Philadelphia has a law degree and a master's in agricultural law, and she passed the bar in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. These days, she's working with some extremely demanding and exacting clients. Most of them are less than 3 years old. Newhall's primary income source for the past few years has been baby-sitting. Parents, said Newhall, are "blown away. They're like, 'Oh my gosh! You're the most overeducated nanny I've ever had.' " But jobs are scarce, and all that education came with six-figure debt for...

At $3.67, US Regular gasoline prices are their highest since March 2013 having risen over 12% (40c) in the last 2 months. This must be great news, right? It must mean world demand is picking up and driving up prices of crude oil as global trade soars (amid a collapsing Baltic Dry and decelerating Chinese growth). This can't be related to "war premia" right? - as we noted here - because stocks (which always know best) have discounted all this tomfoolery. However, as the following chart shows, each time gas prices have surged up toards the Maginot Line of $3.80,...

Nearly Half Of Us Couldn't Live A Month On Our Savings Trae Bodge , RetailMeNot's The Real Deal Apr. 1, 2014, 5:56 PM April is Financial Literacy Month (and dreaded tax time), so let’s talk about your financial know-how. Are you financially prepared if you need to stop working for a few months due to a layoff or illness? Do you know how much money you have lying around? What about your kids? Are you setting them on a path to financial health? RetailMeNot recently polled more than 1,000 Americans and found that overall consumers are doing pretty well on...

By the time ObamaCare and the minimum wage get done wiping out jobs, everyone will need that basic guaranteed income that libs love talking about. Citing Obamacare and an increase in the stateÂ’s minimum wage, the owner of Waterford-based Yankee One Dollar is closing down shop on all 23 remaining locations.Its owner Keith Flike blamed the Affordable Care Act and the increase in the stateÂ’s minimum wage for the decision to shut down. Each store has six to 10 employees, he told the Post Star. Those are just more employees who have been liberated from job lock to explore their...

Citing Obamacare and an increase in the state’s minimum wage, the owner of Waterford-based Yankee One Dollar is closing down shop on all 23 remaining locations. Via the Times Union: Waterford-based Yankee One Dollar stores will be gone within the next five months, its owner told the Post Star of Glens Falls. Keith Flike blamed the Affordable Care Act and the increase in the state’s minimum wage for the decision to shut down. Each store has six to 10 employees, he told the Post Star. Yankee One Dollar has 23 stores, down from a peak of 39. The Daily Gazette reported...

Caesars Entertainment announced in a press release Wednesday that it will close Harrah's Tunica on June 2. This is one of three casinos Harrah's operates in Tunica in northern Mississippi. The 1,300 jobs that will be lost makes this one of the biggest layoffs ever in Mississippi, said Richard Bennett, chairman of the House Gaming Committee. The layoffs come at a time when Tunica County had the highest unemployment in state in February at 17.3 percent. Bennett said 75 percent of the jobs are held by Mississippi residents, with the remaining 25 percent of the employees from Tennessee and Arkansas....