In a story Jan. 4 about The Boeing Co.’s announcement that it is closing its plant in Wichita, Kan., The Associated Press reported erroneously that the closure will cost 2,160 workers their jobs. An unspecified number of those workers will be allowed to transfer to the company’s plants in other states cheap pay day loans.
A steady decline in the number of people applying for weekly unemployment benefits is the latest signal that the economy has strengthened and businesses may be poised to step up hiring.
Applications fell last week fell to a seasonally adjusted 381,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s the lowest level since late February.
And a four-week average for applications, which smooths week-to-week fluctuations, fell for the ninth time in 11 weeks to an eight-month low.
The downward trend in unemployment benefit applications bolsters the view that the economy has improved from its spring slump, when many feared another recession was likely. Consumer confidence is up, retailers reported a strong start to the holiday shopping season and the unemployment rate fell last month to its lowest point in two and a half years.
“There have been numerous indications that the labor market is healing and today’s jobless claims report only reinforces that view,” Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at BTIG, a trading firm.
Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, said the drop in unemployment benefit claims reflects relief among businesses that consumer demand didn’t plunge this fall as some had feared.
“We expect claims to head slowly downwards for the foreseeable future, and in due course payroll growth will accelerate,” Shepherdson said in a note to clients.
Applications that drop below 375,000 _ consistently _ tend to correlate with a steady decline in the unemployment rate.
The unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent in November, the government said last week, down from 9 percent the previous month. Still, the rate dropped last month in part because more people gave up looking for work. Once the unemployed stop looking for jobs and drop out of the work force, they are no longer counted as unemployed.
Employers added a net total of 120,000 jobs last month. The economy has generated 100,000 or more jobs five months in a row _ the first time that has happened since April 2006 no faxing payday loans.
Many economists expect growth to accelerate in the final three months of the year, to about a 3 percent annual rate. That would be an improvement from 2 percent growth in the July-September period.
But the U.S. economy is vulnerable to shocks from overseas. European leaders are struggling to contain a two-year old debt crisis and the 17 nations that use the euro may already be in recession, economists say.
That could slow U.S. exports and cut into overseas profits earned by U.S. multinationals. Even worse, the crisis could force European banks to cut back on lending and U.S. banks to follow suit, leading to a credit crunch. Most economists are penciling in slower U.S. growth next year, partly because of Europe’s slowdown.
Fewer people are receiving unemployment benefits, and the number of people on extended benefits also fell. Some of that decline is because those out of work found jobs. But economists think most have likely used up all their benefits.
The number of people receiving benefits fell by 174,000 to 3.58 million. But that doesn’t include several million people receiving aid under extended programs put in place during the recession. All told, 6.6 million people received unemployment aid in the week ending Nov. 19, the latest data available. That’s about 400,000 fewer than the previous week.
Congress is debating whether to continue the extended benefit program, which expires at the end of this year. The program provides up to 99 weeks of benefits in states with high unemployment rates. If the program isn’t continued, the Labor Department estimates that about 1.8 million people could lose benefits by early February.
How metro areas with more than 1 million people ranked in net domestic migration - the number of people who moved to a place, minus those who moved away — for people age 25 to 34. Does not include foreign immigration.
Annual average for three-year period
1: Riverside, Calif. +23,147 1: Denver +10,429
2: Phoenix +14,220 2: Houston +9,366
3: Atlanta +12,167 3: Dallas +8.731
4: Houston +10,992 4: Seattle +7,451
5: Charlotte +9,273 5: Austin, Tex. +7,099
38: St. Louis -2,349 24: St. Louis +870
47: Chicago -13,859 47: Miami -5,724
48: Miami -15,208 48: Detroit -7,501
49: New Orleans -18,626 49: Chicago -9,645
50: New York -47,027 50: New York -22,325
51: Los Angeles -53,795 51: Los Angeles -24,470
Source: Census/Brookings Institution
Ashok Kokane sits amid his strawberries at Mumbai’s Crawford Market, a handwritten ledger across his knees and a fan of dirty 10 rupee notes at his hand. The lazy, dust-encrusted ceiling fans above are far past cleaning.
There is a sense of timelessness here, in the lurking cats, the shiny shrine to the fearsome Hindu goddess Durga and the cry “Porter? Porter?” sent up by skinny boys with frayed baskets on their heads. It is a tableau many fear will disappear after the government’s decision last week to give foreign big box retailers like Wal-Mart greater access to India’s huge market.
“When big man comes, small man goes,” Kokane said.
The arrival of modern retailing would hasten a cultural transformation in the way Indians shop and work. The debate now raging _ which has shut down Parliament _ hinges on competing visions of what foreign retailers will mean to agriculture and retail, India’s two largest sources of jobs.
The government argues organized retail will make food cheaper, liberate millions from medieval working conditions and put more money into the hands of desperate farmers. Others say it will deepen the inequities of Indian society and wipe out a merchant class whose values and skills have been passed from father to son for generations.
The existing retail landscape is an intricate tangle of shops and bazaars, forged by ideas that date back to India’s earliest religious texts. But, even without Wal-Mart, small, family run shops are already under threat. With the fraying of caste ties, which often determine a family’s profession, and the growing dreams of India’s youth for better paid, more prestigious jobs, retailers are finding it hard to keep the next generation in the family business.
“You have different sets of people who, because of the caste system, have been involved in the same business for many generations,” said Arvind Singhal, founder of Technopak Advisors, a New Delhi based consulting company. These days, he said, “A shopkeeper’s son may not be a shopkeeper.”
Today, organized retail accounts for just 5.5 percent of India’s $470 billion retail market, according to Technopak. Food accounts for about 70 percent of the retail market, which Technopak expects will hit $675 billion by 2016.
Existing domestic supermarkets, like Reliance’s Fresh, Godrej’s Nature’s Basket and Tata’s Westside, have struggled to succeed.
Some sell, at exorbitant prices, rotten dairy goods, pasta infested with bugs and icy $12 pints of Haagen Dazs, repeatedly thawed and refrozen.
Stocking irregularities mean those last cans of Italian plum tomatoes might not be replaced for a month. Shoppers sometimes put back items because the clerk can’t figure out how to get his computer to register the bar code.
“The traditional retailer in India can offer better value than some of the large, organized players,” Singhal said.
The best local shops are marvels of service and quality, bundled with a nice human touch. If you’re short money, you can pay next time. If you want a fistful of flat-leafed parsley or a special pan, they can get it in a day or two. Every organized urban household has a raft of phone numbers for home delivery of cat food, toilet paper, chickens and pretty much anything else.
Yet there are severe drawbacks to the system cash advance today.
India’s market and roadside stalls employ, at backbreaking rates, armies of slim men pedaling rusted bicycles stacked improbably high with eggs for delivery. They run up dark staircases offering fresh rolls wrapped in newspaper and carry cases of bottled water on their heads two and three at a time.
“No one benefits from this kind of employment,” Singhal said. “People are hardly getting money for those jobs.” Far better _ and cheaper for the retailer, he argues _ to hire one well-trained, decently paid person than five low paid workers and spur a virtuous cycle of rising productivity and increased consumption.
Many argue that retailing in India is not yet a zero-sum game: Demand is growing fast enough that big and small players can thrive side by side. The Ministry of Commerce noted that in China, more than 600 hypermarkets opened between 1996 and 2001 but the number of small stores grew too: from 1.9 million to over 2.5 million.
The ministry predicts modernization will create some 10 million new jobs in areas like food processing and transport, as well as in the new retail outlets. They say the more open policy will drive down skyrocketing food prices and help millions of farmers get more money for their crops by eliminating waste and middlemen.
Others say the changes will hurt small farmers at the backbone of India’s rural economy, pushing more of them off the land with few tools to forge a better life elsewhere.
P. Sainath, who has been writing about rural India for 18 years, believes big retail won’t heal the inequities of rural India which have driven over 250,000 farmers to kill themselves since 1995. If anything, he said, it will make them worse.
“One to 2 percent of farmers _ some possibly members of Parliament _ will make a killing. They are the giant farmers,” he said.
Big companies tend to build on existing chains of exploitation, using wholesale agents who extract low prices from unorganized, indebted farmers, whose pricing power will erode further with multinationals, he said. Many of the demonized middlemen, he added, are actually poor women, unlikely to survive the arrival of foreign retail.
“You have no idea of the chaos you are unleashing,” he said.
Reza Meghani, who runs Metro Dry Fruits _ a small stall that has been selling some of the Mumbai’s best dried fruit and nuts for 22 years _ remains confident.
Mumbai’s existing supermarkets haven’t hurt him: They have higher overhead, compromise on quality and charge too much, he said. They can’t compete with the tenderness with which he discusses the eight varieties of almonds he imports from America and Iran.
“We can compete. We will have to compromise on our margins,” said Meghani, 56, who is grooming his son to take over.
Neha Sheikh, 23, says her family has been shopping at his stall for a decade. “The salesperson is really good,” she said. “He’s going to help you out in every little thing.” She doesn’t buy nuts from supermarkets because they’re too expensive.
But if they were cheaper? “Yeah,” she said. “Why not?”
U.S. stock futures are slipping after disappointing corporate earnings and another sign that Europe’s credit crisis isn’t solved.
Moody’s warned late Monday that it may downgrade France’s top-notch credit rating in the next three months. That country’s finance minister said Tuesday that the French economy may grow at a slower pace than expected.
In the U.S., International Business Machines Corp. fell 4 percent in premarket trading after missing Wall Street’s revenue estimates last quarter free online credit report.
Goldman Sachs, Apple and Intel will release earnings by the end of the day.
Two hours before the market opened, Dow futures fell 34 points, or 0.3 percent, to 11,267. S&P 500 futures lost 2, or 0.2 percent, to 1,191. Nasdaq 100 futures gained 7, or 0.3 percent, to 2,327.
The world’s largest ticket sellers and the world’s largest social network have created a new interactive venture to let people buy concert and sports tickets near their friends.
Their Facebook friends.
So far, 9,000 events are linked to the interactive seat-selection maps.
“All of our NHL clients are using it. The Air Canada Centre is using it for the Raptors, and we have basic concern configurations done for them,” Kip Levin, executive vice president of E-commerce at Live Nation, told the Star on Thursday.
Live Nation owns Ticketmaster, where North American revenue dropped 11 per cent last year, and new CEO Nathan Hubbard has declared the future lies in social media.
“The Number 1 driver here is just to make the experience better,” said Levin. “A lot of events are social, so it’s valuable to you as a consumer.”
Another driver is the fact that 40 per cent of tickets for some events go unsold on average, often because potential buyers were unaware of the event.
Ticketmaster is hoping concert or game fans will also recommend an upcoming event on Facebook so their friends might know about it and then buy tickets, Levin said.
With this new feature, ticket buyers can tag their seat purchase through their Facebook site. Before they buy a ticket, they can see where other Facebook friends who’ve also tagged their purchases are sitting.
Facebook gets no money from the deal, said Levin, but “our clients have the option of taking the information and extending it into their ad units for sponsored stories.”
Acknowledging Facebook users’ ire over privacy controls, the feature allows a ticket buyer to limit who on Facebook can see their purchase.
The electronically generated information also gives Ticketmaster another level of spurring sales, he said.
“We know you bought Leafs’ tickets in the past, so now we can recommend games that you’ll know you have friends going to.”
About 75 per cent of the people who use Ticketmaster.com also use Facebook, Ticketmaster said on its blog.E
The Dow Jones industrial average notched a three-day win streak Monday for the first time in six weeks. A $19 billion corporate buying spree and encouraging economic news from Japan sent the Dow up 213 points and erased its losses from last week.
The return of what’s called “Merger Monday” on Wall Street made investors more optimistic about the future. So did a report that Japan’s economy shrank less than feared after the earthquake and tsunami there on March 11. That helped ease worries that the U.S. economy may slide into another recession.
The Dow rose 213.88 points, or 1.9 percent to 11,482.90. It has gained 763 points since Thursday. That’s the best three-day point gain since it rose 927 in November 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis. The Dow is also up 7.1 percent over the three days, the biggest percentage gain since it rose 9.5 percent the first three days of the bull market in March 2009.
Markets may have stabilized the last three days, but financial analysts warned investors not to assume that stocks have fully settled down after last week’s swings. The Dow rose or fell by at least 400 points in four straight days for the first time. The first downgrade of the U.S. credit rating triggered the volatility. It was worsened by concerns that Europe’s debt problems are worsening and that the U.S. economy is weakening.
“You might have these moments of quiet, but the debt crisis in Europe did not go away,” said John Hailer, chief executive for the U cash advance in one hour.S. and Asia of Natixis Global Asset Management. “Our issues with the debt, with what our tax policy is going to be going forward, our unemployment did not go away.”
“We are probably going to have to look at some very different levels of volatility than what a lot of investors grew up with over the last 25 to 30 years,” he said.
A period of relative stability has been common in past volatile markets. In 2008, stocks plunged between mid-September and mid-November. From mid-November until the beginning of January 2009, the Dow was in a lull of sorts. It ratcheted up and down, mostly in the high 8,000 range. But in early January 2009, it began to plunge again and finally hit bottom at 6,547 on March 9.
Despite its three-day gain, the Dow remains down 9.8 percent since its most recent high on July 21 and down 10.4 percent since its 2011 high set on April 29.
More swings could come this week. Leaders of France and Germany meet today to discuss Europe’s debt problems. Spain and other countries have borrowed so much that they may need help to repay their bills. Also today, investors will get an update on how Spain’s economy did during the second quarter.
Tensions between Britain’s government and police leaders flared Saturday over Prime Minister David Cameron’s recruitment of a veteran American police commander to advise him on how to combat gangs and prevent a repeat of the past week’s riots.
The criticism, led by Association of Chief Police Officers leader Sir Hugh Orde, underscored deep tensions between police and Cameron’s coalition government over who was most to blame for the failure to stop the four-day rioting that raged in parts of London and other English cities until Wednesday.
Cameron criticized police tactics as too timid and announced he would seek policy guidance from William Bratton, former commander of police forces in Boston, New York and Los Angeles. British police have branded the move misguided and an insult to their professionalism.
“I am not sure I want to learn about gangs from an area of America that has 400 of them,” Orde said of Los Angeles, which the 63-year-old Bratton oversaw until 2009.
“It seems to me, if you’ve got 400 gangs, then you’re not being very effective. If you look at the style of policing in the states, and their levels of violence, they are fundamentally different from here,” said Orde, a former commander of Northern Ireland’s police and deputy commander of London’s Metropolitan Police. Orde made his comments to the Independent on Sunday newspaper.
The riots row overshadowed a day of peace on England’s streets and continued progress in processing more than 2,100 riot suspects arrested so far, mostly in London, in unprecedented round-the-clock court sessions.
In England’s second-largest city of Birmingham, prosecutors charged two males with the murder of three men in a hit-and-run attack Wednesday, the deadliest event during the past week’s urban mayhem.
Both males _ identified as Joshua Donald, 26, and a 17-year-old whose name was withheld because of his juvenile status _ were being arraigned Sunday at Birmingham Magistrates Court on three counts each of murder.
The breakthrough by a team of 70 detectives came less than four days after Haroon Jahan, 20, and brothers Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31, were mortally wounded when a car struck them at high speed. The trio had been part of a larger group standing guard in front of a row of Pakistani-owned shops.
The killings threatened to ignite clashes between the area’s South Asian and black gangs, but the father of Haroon Jahan made a series of impressively composed public statements in the hours after his son’s death pleading for forgiveness, racial harmony and no retaliation.
Hours before Saturday’s murder charges were announced, the father, Tariq Jahan, told journalists at a Birmingham news conference he had received thousands of letters from well-wishers worldwide.
“I would like to thank the community, especially the young people, for listening to what I have to say and staying calm,” said Jahan, 46, a delivery driver for an electronics chain.
Police in London were continuing to interrogate several suspects linked to the riots’ two other killings: of a 26-year-old man shot to death in a car after a high-speed chase involving a rival group of men, and a 68-year-old loner who was beaten to death after arguing with rioters and trying to extinguish a fire they had set bad credit payday advance.
England’s forces of law and order have been on the defensive over their slow initial response to riots that rapidly spread Aug. 6 from the north London district of Tottenham to several London flashpoints and, eventually, to Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham and other cities with high gang activity.
But police leaders mounted a series of critical interviews Saturday underscoring their view that Cameron was jumping the gun by seeking foreign advice at a time when his debt-hit government was pressing ahead with plans to cut police budgets by 20 percent.
Leaders of the police unions in London and the northwest city of Manchester _ which dealt relatively harshly with rioters and quelled trouble there in one night _ stressed that Cameron needed to listen to their expertise first, rather than seek to apply lessons from America’s better-armed, more aggressive approach to policing.
“America polices by force. We don’t want to do that in this country,” said Paul Deller of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents more than 30,000 officers in the British capital.
Deller, a 25-year Met officer, accused the government of not being serious about following Bratton’s recipe for reducing crime.
“When Mr. Bratton was in New York and Los Angeles, the first thing he did was to increase the number of police on the street, whereas we’ve got a government that wants to do exactly the opposite,” he said, warning that planned budget cuts would mean 2,000 officers lose their jobs in London and thousands more nationwide.
Ian Hanson, chairman of the federation’s Manchester branch, said local officers knew better how to police their own communities than “someone who lives 5,000 miles away.”
Results of an opinion poll published Sunday suggested stronger public support for the police than for Cameron’s approach to the crisis.
The poll, commissioned jointly by British newspapers Sunday Mirror and the Independent on Sunday, found that 61 percent thought Cameron and his Cabinet colleagues were too slow to end their foreign summer holidays following last weekend’s outbreak of violence. Cameron returned to London from his break in Italy’s Tuscany region Tuesday, after almost all of the London rioting had passed.
And strong majorities backed greater support and resources for the police, calling for planned budget cuts to be put on hold. About 65 percent said British troops should be used to reinforce police in event of future riots, while even heavier majorities said police should be permitted to use water cannon and plastic bullets against rioters and impose curfews on unruly communities. All of those measures have been used to control street violence in the British territory of Northern Ireland but never in Britain itself.
The survey of 2,008 people, conducted Tuesday and Wednesday, had an error margin of 3 percentage points.
Greece has banned short selling on the stock market for two months from Tuesday, after shares on the Athens Stock Exchange plunged to their lowest level in more than 14 years.
The bourse’s general index sank below the 1,000-point mark Monday, closing down 6 percent at 998.24 _ the lowest level since January, 1997 _ as financial markets were buffeted by worries over the U.S. economy following a downgrade of the country’s debt.
The slide was markedly more than the declines recorded in other markets in Europe.
Greece became the first EU country to seek an international bailout last year, when it saw its borrowing costs spiral out of control as investors doubted it could repay its debts. International creditors agreed last month to extend it a second bailout.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
ATHENS, Greece (AP) _ Shares on the Athens Stock Exchange plunged Monday to their lowest level in more than 14 years, with the bourse’s general index sinking below the 1,000-point mark as financial markets remained spooked by a downgrade of U.S. debt.
The Greek index dropped 6 percent to 998.24 points _ the lowest level since January, 1997. That’s markedly more than the declines recorded in other markets in Europe.
Debt-ridden Greece became the first European Union country to seek an international bailout last year, when it saw its borrowing costs spiral out of control as investors doubted the country could repay its massive debts.
The financial crisis has also affected other eurozone countries, with Portugal and Ireland also receiving bailouts.
On Monday, Europe’s central bank is widely thought to have begun buying the depressed-bonds of Italy and Spain to calm investor fears that the two countries won’t be able to pay their debts.
Though that bond-buying effort appears to have worked in the short-term by reducing the two countries borrowing costs, stock markets around the world have been in retreat as investors respond to Standard & Poor’s momentous downgrade of the U.S.’s rating.
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