Shanghai and Beijing are becoming new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates who face unemployment nearing double digits at home.

Even those with limited or no knowledge of Chinese are heeding the call. They are lured by China’s surging economy, the lower cost of living and a chance to bypass some of the dues-paying that is common to first jobs in the United States.

“I’ve seen a surge of young people coming to work in China over the last few years,” said Jack Perkowski, founder of Asimco Technologies, one of the largest automotive parts companies in China.

“When I came over to China in 1994, that was the first wave of Americans coming to China,” he said. “These young people are part of this big second wave.”

Read it all.

The Episcopal Church Center has begun staff layoffs and program changes necessitated by the General Convention’s “austerity” triennial budget, according to a statement released Wednesday by the Office of Public Affairs.

The $141 million, three-year budget adopted by General Convention was a $12 million reduction compared to the budget approved for the 2007-2009 triennium, and $20 million less than the amount approved by Executive Council in January. As part of the cuts, 40 staff positions are being eliminated or will have hours reduced, affecting some 35 current employees in such areas as evangelism, diocesan services, women’s ministry, anti-racism training, lay and ordained ministry, and worship and spirituality.

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Digging out of debt keeps getting harder for the unemployed as more companies use detailed credit checks to screen job prospects.

Out of work since December, Juan Ochoa was delighted when a staffing firm recently responded to his posting on Hotjobs.com with an opening for a data entry clerk. Before he could do much more, though, the firm checked his credit history.

The interest vanished. There were too many collections claims against him, the firm said.

“I never knew that nowadays they were going to start pulling credit checks on you even before you go for an interview,” said Mr. Ochoa, 46, who lost his job in December tracking inventory at a mining company in Santa Fe Springs, Calif. “Why would they need to pull a credit report? They’d need something like that if you were applying at a bank.”

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Like the United States, Canada adopted a stimulus plan. But while the U.S. plan amounted to 5 percent of GDP over three years, Canada’s plan gave a jolt of 2.5 percent, in only a little more than one year. So Canada got more bang for less buck. If both country’s projections prove accurate, Canadians in 2015 will shoulder only about one-third as much debt per person as Americans.

More and more, the $800 billion stimulus plan is looking like a great mistake — too much long-term debt for too little immediate benefit, all of it too closely tied to the Democratic party’s political imperatives in the 2010 election cycle.

The result: an unemployment rate in the United States fully one point higher than in Canada. To paraphrase a television commercial familiar to Canadians of a certain age, “Only in Canada? What a pity.”

Read or listen to it all.

Over the coming months, as many as 1.5 million jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment insurance benefits, ending what for some has been a last bulwark against foreclosures and destitution.

Because of emergency extensions already enacted by Congress, laid-off workers in nearly half the states can collect benefits for up to 79 weeks, the longest period since the unemployment insurance program was created in the 1930s. But unemployment in this recession has proved to be especially tenacious, and a wave of job-seekers is using up even this prolonged aid.

Tens of thousands of workers have already used up their benefits, and the numbers are expected to soar in the months to come, reaching half a million by the end of September and 1.5 million by the end of the year, according to new projections by the National Employment Law Project, a private research group.

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Right now, [Jamie] Clark’s boss has to make sure that, including tips, she goes home with at least $6.55 an hour. With tomorrow’s raise, Clark knows she’ll be coming home to her son with at least $7.25 for each hour of effort.

It might not seem like much. But up until now, her son, Edward, has been getting his clothing and toys from neighbors once their kids are done with them.

“That’s what I’m thinking about in my head,” Clark says. “I’m like, $7.25? Now I can buy this. It’s just really embarrassing not to be able to provide those simple things.”

Maybe the extra money isn’t enough for new clothing for Edward. But Clark thinks she has a better chance of buying a few of his school supplies. And perhaps just one of those Transformer toys he’s been begging for.

Read or listen to it all.

What is a mancession, you ask? It’s not this. It’s a recession that hurts men much more than women, and we are allegedly in the worst mancession in recent history. Eighty percent of job losses in the last two years were among men, said AEI scholar Christina Hoff Summers, and it could get worse.

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The June employment report suggests that the alleged green shoots are mostly yellow weeds that may eventually turn into brown manure. The employment report shows that conditions in the labor market continue to be extremely weak, with job losses in June of over 460,000. With the current rate of job losses, it is very clear that the unemployment rate could reach 10% by later this summer–around August or September–and will be closer to 10.5%, if not 11%, by year-end. I expect the unemployment rate is going to peak at around 11% at some point in 2010, well above historical standards for even severe recessions.

It’s clear that even if the recession were to be over anytime soon–and it’s not going to be over before the end of the year–job losses are going to continue for at least another year and a half. Historically, during the last two recessions, job losses continued for at least a year and a half after the recession was over. During the 2001 recession, the recession was over in November 2001, and job losses continued through August 2003 for a cumulative loss of jobs of over 5 million; this time we are already seeing more than 6 million job losses and the recession is not over.

Read the whole thing.

PAUL SOLMAN: Here are the new numbers from the Labor Department’s monthly survey of 60,000 households. The official number is what the government reports as U-3, 14.7 million unemployed as of June. That’s 9.5 percent.

U-4 adds discouraged workers who’ve stopped looking. That would make unemployment 10 percent.

U-5, marginally attached workers who say they’d take a job, but haven’t looked in a month. The number would then be up to 10.8 percent.

The most inclusive number, U-6, adds part-timers looking for full-time work, bringing the total to 16.5 percent.

Read, or better watch, it all.

Nor should the “brown weeds” camp rely too heavily on the payrolls numbers; unemployment is famously a lagging indicator. Nevertheless, it is a bit hard to see where the recovery is coming from. American wages are up just 2.7% a year, and it is a lot harder for workers to borrow money to maintain their spending. The boost from lower gasoline prices (seen in the winter) is disappearing and consumers seem to be saving, not spending, their tax breaks. David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff points out that same store sales are down 4.4% year-on-year, a bigger decline than that seen in May. If consumers are not spending, why would business invest? We have seen some kind of a rebound, after inventories were slashed in late 2008, but will it last?

So why might it be “different this time”? The difference lies in the high debt levels being carried by consumers entering into this crisis, the shrinking of the financial sector from its excessive size of two yeara ago. These are burdens that take years to work off. The action taken by governments and central banks may have headed off a Great Depression; they cannot prevent a long period of austerity.

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Job losses accelerated more quickly than expected last month and the unemployment rate rose to 9.5%, casting doubt on prospects for the U.S. economy to soon rebound.

U.S. employment fell by a seasonally adjusted 467,000 jobs in June, after declining by 322,000 the month before, the Labor Department said Thursday. The report is at odds with such signs of recent economic improvement as growing home sales and increased business investment.

“I think we’re past the period of free fall in the economy but it would be premature to say that we’ve reached the bottom, or might, within the next couple of months,” said Jeffrey Frankel, an economics professor at Harvard University. “I’m expecting the recovery to be a slow one.”

This one is splashed across the front page of this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Read it all.

If, as expected, 363,000 jobs were eliminated last month, it will mean 131.8 million people are working in the U.S.–the same as May of 2000. If another million jobs disappear by the end of the year–likely, without unexpected improvement–an entire decade of employment gains will have been wiped out. In January of 2000, there were 130.8 million jobs in the country. “It’s not that those jobs weren’t needed. The labor force has grown by nearly 13 million people,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute.

—Forbes Magazine.

In concrete terms, the difference between the situation that the Obama advisers predicted and the one that has come to pass is about 2.5 million jobs. It’s as if every worker in the city of Los Angeles received an unexpected layoff notice.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Famed blacksmith Philip Simmons, whose wrought iron gates and other works grace gardens and entryways along the South Carolina coast and beyond U.S. borders, died at age 97, friends and funeral officials said Tuesday.

Read it all–and note the church affiliation, of which I was unaware.

Why are jobs lost and which industry groups are the hardest hit? Is there a relationship between age and education levels and unemployment? Are rural areas more vulnerable? Are vocational retraining programs readily available ”” and effective? And what about this engaging irony: 78,000 South Carolina workers are receiving unemployment benefits, yet thousands of job openings are posted in various forums every day. The Web site Indeed.com lists more than 32,000 open positions throughout the state. Financial assistance is critical to the jobless, but so are counseling, guidance and retraining.

Has the crush of processing jobless benefits overtaken the S.C. Employment Security Commission’s mandate to match jobs with job hunters? How many willing workers are finding jobs with the commission’s assistance? How many unwilling workers are collecting unemployment benefits?

Spiraling unemployment is the state’s critical current challenge. Dealing with it must involve more than just processing applications and passing out checks. Surely, the commission would agree.

Read it all.

The nation’s foreclosure crisis ”” once largely confined to only a few corners of the country ”” is spreading to new areas as the economy teeters. The foreclosure rates in 40 of the nation’s counties that have the most households have already doubled from last year, a USA TODAY analysis of data from the listing firm RealtyTrac shows.

Most were in areas far removed from the avalanche of bad mortgages and lost homes that have hammered the U.S. housing market. Among the new areas: Boise and Green Bay, Wis.

“The ripple effect is just broadening out to cover a lot more places,” says Susan Wachter, who studies real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

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[Mark] Sanford thinks much could be accomplished on economic development when lawmakers return in January for Sanford’s final General Assembly session.

Lawmakers agreed the stimulus debate did little to further damage the relationship, but noted years of conflicts often fueled by gubernatorial press conferences had left little rapport between Republican Sanford and the Republican-controlled Legislature.

But lawmakers said that if anything can bring the two sides together, it is the state’s growing jobless rate ”” now 12.1 percent.

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While some other states with high unemployment, including Michigan, have seen their labor forces shrink, Oregon’s labor force has grown. Economists say some of the growth appears to be driven by people who moved here with money they made in California, whether from real estate or stock market investments, and expected to get by but now must look for work.

“It’s just so depressing to hear them because they thought they had life handled and they don’t,” said Bobbie Faust, an employment counselor who works for the state in Bend.

The Telfords are among those facing trouble. They had presumed they would be able to sell their house in Fresno for more than $300,000 to help pay the mortgage on the new house they bought near the Deschutes River in Bend for $475,000. But the Fresno house has yet to sell, and Mrs. Telford, an accountant, has lost a series of jobs at small firms here that she said had downsized. The couple’s only income now comes from her unemployment checks and her husband’s salary as a high school teacher.

“The cash flow is negative,” Mrs. Telford said. “This will be the first time we’ve had to go into savings.”

A very good article about some of what is happening underneath the surface of the economy. Read it all.

President Barack Obama faces a dilemma as he fights the recession: The public identifies both rising unemployment and soaring budget deficits as its top policy concerns — but fixing one could worsen the other.

Mr. Obama can ill afford to lose public support on the cusp of the biggest political fights of his presidency, over health care, energy and financial reregulation. Three separate polls this week, including one from the Wall Street Journal/NBC News, have raised red flags at the White House that the president, though still personally popular, is losing some ground with the public on his economic policies.

Officials concede there is little the president can do to please everyone, given the economic Catch-22. If he heeds concerns on the deficit and pulls back on economic stimulus, he risks choking off the “green shoots” of what may be a fledgling recovery.

Read it all.

With steep state budget cuts under debate in Sacramento, Los Angeles County supervisors voted Tuesday to push for changes to CalWorks and other government aid programs they said would save nearly $270 million.

Included in their suggestions is a novel proposal: Put unemployed parents to work caring for their own children.

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With the unemployment rate at 9.4 percent and ticking up, millions of Americans are in the job market for the first time in several years.

But the job market has changed in that short time. The paper resume is laughably passe, at least in some circles. Not having a profile on the social networking site LinkedIn is, for some employers, not only a major liability but a sign that the candidate is horribly out of touch.

“If someone sends us a paper resume folded in thirds, stuffed in an envelope, it’s hard to take it seriously,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate brokerage.

Read it all.

People who still have jobs are faring worse than at any time since the Great Depression, a USA TODAY analysis of employment data found. Furloughs, pay cuts and reduced hours are taking a toll on workers who so far have escaped job cuts.

The employed worked fewer hours in May ”” an average of just 33.1 hours a week ”” than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began counting in 1964. Part-time work is at a record high. Overtime is at a record low.

The magnitude of job losses ”” 6 million jobs gone, a 9.4% unemployment rate ”” has overshadowed the groundbreaking nature of the nation’s employment troubles, especially the financial decline of those still working.

Read it all.

Deidre Murphy: I’m Deidre Murphy. I live in Blythewood, S.C. and I’m 47. I was in marketing. I was making, gosh with benefits and everything and with bonus, about $95,000. I got $326 a week, which is the absolute maximum in South Carolina. If I cobbled all four of those checks together, I could pay my mortgage. I have zero savings left. I did everything I could to pay my mortgage, to protect my credit and now that I’ve been unemployed for so long, I’m not eligible for any of these wonderful mortgage programs. So yeah, I’m a little angry, to be perfectly honest.

You know, I didn’t feel like it was my fault that I got laid off at all. It had nothing to do with my job performance. My ego started taking a hit, when I started getting rejected everywhere I was looking for a job. I would either hear nothing or I’d get an actually rejection. Then you start hearing every week the numbers of who was getting laid off and then, I’m talking to all these people, everybody I know knows somebody who’s been laid off.

Clorene Jones: I’m Clorene Jones, Greensboro, S.C. I worked in a weave mill for 46 years. Last March of 2008, the place that I worked closed down. Hadn’t worked too long. I hadn’t been back to work, but not quite a year, but I did get some unemployment, $193 a week. And then I’ve drawn up Social Security too, that helps.

Well I had a job to go to another plant, but when I went, because I didn’t have a GED or a diploma, they wouldn’t hire me. I finished the 10th grade when I was going to school. Well some of it I find hard, especially the algebra part of it. I wasn’t too good in school, it’s real hard.

Read or listen to it all.

The Treasury bond market is in cardiac arrest today over the May employment report: Yields are soaring, dealing another blow to investors who’ve been hiding out in government bonds — and threatening another big jump in mortgage rates.

If rising home loan rates price more buyers out of the market, sellers will have to respond by cutting asking prices. Anyone have a better idea?

the trend is not good.

The first poll of Britain’s churchgoers, carried out for The Sunday Telegraph, found that thousands of them believe they are being turned down for promotion because of their faith.

One in five said that they had faced opposition at work because of their beliefs.

More than half of them revealed that they had suffered some form of persecution for being a Christian.

Read the whole aritcle.

The Ferrells have cut back on dance lessons for their twin daughters. Vaccinations for the family’s two cats and two dogs are out. Haircuts have become a luxury.

And before heading out recently to the discount grocery store that has become the family’s new lifeline, Sharon Ferrell checked her bank account balance one more time, dialing the toll-free number from memory.

“Your available balance for withdrawal is, $490.40,” the disembodied electronic voice informed her.

At the store, with that number firmly in mind, she punched the price of each item into a calculator as she dropped it into her cart, making sure she stayed under her limit. It was all part of a new regimen of fiscal restraint for the Ferrells, begun in January, when state workers, including Mrs. Ferrell’s husband, Jeff, were forced to accept two-day-a-month furloughs.

For millions of families, this is the recession: not a layoff, or a drastic reduction in income, but a pay cut that has forced them to thrash through daily calculations similar to the Ferrells’.

Read the whole piece from the front page of Friday’s New York Times.

As job losses rise, growing numbers of American homeowners with once solid credit are falling behind on their mortgages, amplifying a wave of foreclosures.

In the latest phase of the nation’s real estate disaster, the locus of trouble has shifted from subprime loans ”” those extended to home buyers with troubled credit ”” to the far more numerous prime loans issued to those with decent financial histories.

With many economists anticipating that the unemployment rate will rise into the double digits from its current 8.9 percent, foreclosures are expected to accelerate. That could exacerbate bank losses, adding pressure to the financial system and the broader economy.

“We’re about to have a big problem,” said Morris A. Davis, a real estate expert at the University of Wisconsin. “Foreclosures were bad last year? It’s going to get worse.”

Read it all.

As job losses rise, growing numbers of American homeowners with once solid credit are falling behind on their mortgages, amplifying a wave of foreclosures.

In the latest phase of the nation’s real estate disaster, the locus of trouble has shifted from subprime loans ”” those extended to home buyers with troubled credit ”” to the far more numerous prime loans issued to those with decent financial histories.

With many economists anticipating that the unemployment rate will rise into the double digits from its current 8.9 percent, foreclosures are expected to accelerate. That could exacerbate bank losses, adding pressure to the financial system and the broader economy.

“We’re about to have a big problem,” said Morris A. Davis, a real estate expert at the University of Wisconsin. “Foreclosures were bad last year? It’s going to get worse.”

Read it all.

“IT is my mission in life to get this job,” said Amanda Casgar, who is better known to executives at Murphy-Goode Winery in Sonoma County as applicant No. 505.

Three weeks ago Murphy-Goode began a search for a “social media whiz,” a wine enthusiast interested in moving to Healdsburg, Calif., for six months to promote the vineyard’s malbec and chardonnay on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. The job ”” which comes with the official title “lifestyle correspondent” ”” pays $10,000 a month, plus free accommodations at a private home within walking distance of the tasting room. Ms. Casgar, a former magazine marketing executive, has been endorsing herself as enthusiastically as she would a bottle of petit verdot.

Already an occasional Twitterer, she increased the number of tweets she posts; they are mostly about wine. She created a Web site, “Goode Times With Amanda Casgar,” to chronicle her job quest. Like about a half-dozen other eager applicants, she has started a fan group on Facebook, buying ads for 50 cents a click to generate traffic.

And last week Ms. Casgar spent two days filming her video résumé, rejecting the idea to sing a rap song (“I want to demonstrate my personality without being too cheesy or a loser,” she explained) in favor of a sketch dubbed “random acts of wineness.”

Talk about investing in the future. The position of social media specialist, introduced by companies like Comcast, General Motors and JetBlue Airways, has become the hottest new corporate job among the Twitterati.

Read it all from yesterday’s New York Times.

Rodney Ringler is an unemployed blue collar male without a college degree. He’s hardly alone. Men like him have been the main victims of the current recession in the United States.

“I haven’t worked since December of 2007, around the time this recession started,” Ringler, a 49-year-old computer technician, said as he walked his dog in a Dallas suburb.

He sees little light at the end of the tunnel.

Read it all.