Free Republic

Nike stock is plunging on Thursday, the day after President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs that will end the nation’s decades-long free trade policy. “NKE was last seen 11.3% lower at $57.62, as investors digest the long-term impact of rising supply chain costs on the company’s margins,” Schaeffer’s Investment Research reports. “The stock is set to snap a three-day win streak, extending its late-March post-earnings bear gap and hitting its lowest level since November 2017. Nike stock now carries a 23.5% year-to-date deficit.” On Wednesday evening, Trump announced reciprocal tariffs — adding a 34 percent tariff on China, a 46...

“The minimum wage law very clearly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer,” wrote Thomas Sowell, noted economist, social theorist, and Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, in Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy. The minimum wage was never meant to be an income to live off of and support a family with. It was meant to be an entry point into the workforce for low skilled...

Dollar Tree Inc. will build a new $110 million, 1.2 million-square-foot distribution facility in Johnson County. Too bad for the Kansas City metro area that it will be in the Johnson County, Mo., city of Warrensburg — not in Johnson County on the Kansas side. The Missouri Department of Economic Development reported Tuesday that Dollar Tree (Nasdaq: DLTR) will create 375 jobs within three years at the new facility, which will support the retailer’s store network in the Midwest. Tim Cowden, CEO of the Kansas City Area Development Council, said Dollar Tree was “only considering rural markets within the KC...

Guess what? This isn’t a low-wage job recovery. Listen to the media, and you might think that the only kind of jobs being created are in fast-food restaurants and retail chains. It turns out that this is wildly misleading and that the economy’s employment profile — the split between high- and low-paying jobs — hasn’t changed much since the recession or, indeed, the turn of the century. Put differently, the share of high-wage jobs is just below one-third of all employment, roughly where it was in 2000 and 2007 — the last year before the financial crisis. Similarly, the share...

Interested why despite the euphoric headline NFP print, a cursory glance deeper inside the payrolls report reveals weakness after weakness, with both participation plunging again and wages the worst since last summer?

In an apparent attempt to advise investors on how they can take advantage of America’s transformation into a neo-feudal oligarchy in a 50-page research report, Morgan Stanley has put together some very interesting charts.. We will be sharing many of them in the next few days but none is more telling and depressing than the one that shows how the U.S. leads the developed world in the share of low wage jobs...

NEW YORK — Sure, the economy is adding jobs these days…but most of those positions pay pretty poorly. Some 58% of the jobs created during the recovery have been low-wage positions, according to a new report by the National Employment Law Project. Only 22% have been mid-wage jobs and 20% higher-wage positions. These low-wage jobs pay $13.83 an hour or less. “The recovery continues to be skewed toward low-wage jobs, reinforcing the rise in inequality and America’s deficit of good jobs,” said Annette Bernhardt, NELP’s policy co-director. “While there’s understandably a lot of focus on getting employment back

Plans for US-Mexico border fence draw fireBy Tim Gaynor Posted on: Wednesday, 29 March 2006, 08:07 CST TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Hurling himself over a steel fence into the no-man's-land between Mexico and California, an undocumented migrant sprints across a narrow strip lit by harsh arc lights and watched over by video cameras on tall posts. Before he can shin up a second barrier of tall concrete pillars topped with seismic sensors and a layer of steel mesh more than an arm's-length wide, U.S. Border Patrol agents close in fast and arrest him . That scene is repeated dozens of...

Hispanic workers accounted for more than 1 million of the 2.5 million new jobs created by the U.S. economy in 2004. But Hispanics are the only major group of workers to have suffered a two-year decline in wages and they now earn 5 percent less than two years ago, according to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis of latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. Despite strong demand for immigrant workers, their growing supply and concentration in certain occupations suggests that the newest arrivals are competing with each other in the labor market to their own...