Free Republic

On the surface, the March jobs reported was better than expected... except for manufacturing workers. As shown in the chart below, in the past month, a disturbing 29,000 manufacturing jobs were lost. This was the single biggest monthly drop in the series going back to December 2009.  But not all is lost: as has been the case for virtually every month during the "recovery", virtually every laid off manufacturing worker could find a job as a waiter: in March, the workers in the "Food services and drinking places" category, aka waiters, bartenders and minimum wage line cooks, rose again...

With both ISM Manufacturing and Services employment indices collapsing, endless headlines of layoffs, Challenger-Grey noting Q1 as the worst since 2009, and NFIB small business hiring weak, it is no surprise that initial jobless claims is finally waking up. For the 3rd week in a row - the longest streak since July 2015. The last 3 weeks have seen a 9.1% surge in jobless claims - the biggest such rise since April 2014.  And finally, as Challenger-Grey notes, Through the first quarter of 2016, employers announced 184,920 job cuts, up 31.8 percent from the 140,241 cuts tracked the first three...

Banks are quickly approaching their "automation tipping point," and they could soon reduce headcount by as much as 30%. That's according to a new Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions (GPS) report on how financial technology is disrupting banks. "Banks' Uber moment will mean a disintermediation of bank branches rather than the banks themselves," the report said. "Specifically, it will mean the shift to mobile distribution being the main channel of interaction between customers and the bank," the report reads. That means that there will be less need for bank branches, and the people who work inside them. "We believe that...

In a very rare occurrence, Michigan’s unemployment rate in February dipped below the U.S. rate. Michigan’s unemployment rate dropped to 4.8 percent, just below the national average of 4.9 percent. It was only the second time since August 2000 that Michigan had a lower unemployment rate than the U.S. The other time was July 2015 when state unemployment was 5.2 percent. That rate for U.S. was 5.3 percent then. The state added 36,000 jobs in February; the labor force also increased, by 32,000. “Michigan is now in the rare place where the job market is tighter than in the nation...

America has too much junk in the trunk. That’s the assessment of Standard and Poor’s credit rating agency. Their average rating on United States corporate debt just sagged to almost a 15-year low. According to the agency, America faces a debt diet that many companies will not survive. And guess who is to blame? “We believe corporate default rates could increase over the next few years,” warn S&P credit analysts Jacob Crooks and David Tesher. “Lower-quality speculative-grade issuers seeking refinancing or new financing will likely face more onerous terms, conditions and funding challenges, especially in a more nominalized credit environment....

Those who work for Carrier have learned the costs of global trade on a personal and financial level after the company suddenly announced a move to Mexico.

Lobbyists in Washington say they are being flooded with questions and concerns from foreign governments about the rise of Donald Trump. Officials around the globe are closely following the U.S. presidential race, to the point where some have asked their American lobbyists to explain, in great detail, what a contested GOP convention would look like. The questions about Trump are “almost all-consuming,” said Richard Mintz, the managing director of Washington-based firm The Harbour Group, whose client list includes the governments of Georgia and the United Arab Emirates. After a recent trip to London, Abu Dhabi and Beijing, “it’s fair to...

Did you know that when you take the number of working age Americans that are officially unemployed (8.2 million) and add that number to the number of working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force” (94.3 million), that gives us a grand total of 102.5 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now? I have written about this before, but today I want to focus just on Americans that are in their prime working years. When you look at only Americans that are from age 25 to age 54, 23.2 percent...

Men in the U.S. illegally are more likely to work than their native-born counterparts, and they’re willing to take jobs pretty much regardless of how much or little they get paid, new research from Harvard University finds. The study fleshes out the behavior of undocumented workers—a group that by its nature can be difficult to analyze. The challenge of studying the roughly 11.3 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. leaves policy makers guessing on the implications for a wide range of proposals—from offering such workers a path to citizenship to kicking them out of the country. To help fill in...

The state of Michigan experienced the nation’s fourth highest job growth in January, according to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The net employment increase for one month in Michigan was 18,800 jobs from December 2015 to January 2016. Florida experienced the largest gain during this period (32,200 jobs). In the 12 months from January 2015 to January 2016, Michigan added a net 87,300 jobs, 10th-best in the country. California added 444,900 jobs to top the list. California’s population is also nearly four times Michigan’s 10 million. Michigan’s unemployment rate of 4.9 percent in January is the...

The economically illiterate battle for the Democratic presidential nomination continued this past week with both candidates pledging to repeal the "out-dated law of supply and demand." Hillary vowed to enact a $12 per hour minimum wage if she wins her way to the White House later this year. "Republican insistence that raising the cost of employing workers will cause fewer workers to be employed is nonsense," she declared. "If a business needs workers it has to pay whatever it takes to ensure it has enough employees to operate." "The idea that a mere price increase would deter a purchase is...

Mar. 28, 2016 - 10:21 - GOP candidate weighs in on US refugee program, war of words with Ted Cruz

Among many other topics, respondents were asked whether they were struggling economically — or whether they were comfortable and moving up. They were also asked whether they thought it was more of a problem that African-Americans and Latinos are "losing out because of preferences for whites" or whether whites are "losing out because of preferences for blacks and Hispanics." The survey asked this question in order to gauge the sentiment that racial and ethnic groups don't just feel they are facing difficulties in general, but that those losses are being caused by other group's gains.

In Donald Trump’s Worldview, America Comes First, and Everybody Else Pays By DAVID E. SANGER and MAGGIE HABERMANMARCH 26, 2016 Mr. Trump’s views, as he explained them, fit nowhere into the recent history of the Republican Party: He is not in the internationalist camp of President George Bush, nor does he favor President George W. Bush’s call to make it the United States’ mission to spread democracy around the world. He agreed with a suggestion that his ideas might be summed up as “America First.” “Not isolationist, but I am America First,” he said. “I like the expression.” He said...

The news report goes back in time documenting US history of international trade agreements starting from the time of Reagan administration who proposed a North American Common Market to current history. Fast Forward to November of 2004 when the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America is formed. Their focus is no longer trade and prosperity but security. Three private groups headed by the Council of Foreign Relations(CFR) and their respected organizations in Canada and Mexico. They claim in their own words North America is vulnerable on several fronts: the region faces criminal and terrorist security threats, increased...

When asked by Washington Post staff whether he saw disparities in the way U.S. law enforcement treats blacks and whites, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump avoided answering directly and proposed that inner-city blacks need employment. "What would you do for Baltimore, let's say," in the event he was elected president, Post editorial page director Fred Hiatt asked of Trump. Trump responded: "Well, number one, I'd create economic zones. I'd create incentives for companies to move in. I'd work on spirit because the spirit is so low, it's incredible, the unemployment, you look at unemployment for black youth in this country,...

When the Ford Motor Co. decided to move jobs south to Mexico so that it could pay its workers less, billionaire businessman Donald Trump was furious. He made trade inequalities and Ford’s betrayal of American workers a central issue of his campaign. And, without his even being in the Oval Office, it worked. In an interview with CNBC, Ford CEO Mark Fields said that the automaker would be “here to stay.” He also said he had outlined his company’s plans in a letter to Trump.

On Wednesday during his radio program Rush Limbaugh responded to a caller claiming Ted Cruz is not an outsider and is “buddying up” with the establishment. Limbaugh clarified to the caller that Cruz is not the hypocrite – the establishment is.Listen to the full clip here: Below are some excerpts from the transcript: RUSH: I just saw there's a caller on line calling me delusional?  CALLER:  I think, sadly, what you all fail to realize is that perpetually you're painting Ted Cruz as an outsider.  He paints Ted Cruz as an outsider.  The Tea Party tried to paint him as an...

The American People are angry. And it is not cyclical anger – after all, we are sitting at the top of the current business cycle. This anger is a secular trend. There is anger at the lack of jobs, there is anger over class warfare , there is anger at police profiling of young black men, anger at conservatives, anger at political correctness, anger at Liberals, anger at the break down of our inner city infrastructures and the poisoning of water in Flint, Michigan and elsewhere, anger at Hillary Rodham Clinton, anger at Donald Trump, anger at the main...

Senator Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)80% warned that trade deals are eating away our national sovereignty and threatening our security on Thursday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily. Breitbart News executive chairman and host Stephen K. Bannon compared the issues at stake in Britain’s upcoming vote on exiting from the European Union with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and asked Sessions if the latter could be seen as “essentially an up-or-down vote on national sovereignty of the United States of America.” Sessions said the issue of sovereignty was definitely at stake in these elections. “If you don’t secure the border, as Trump...