Nigeria’s iconic National Theatre rises out of the brackish swamps of Lagos near its islands, a massive concrete and marble structure that is a reminder of when the West African nation had seemingly endless oil dollars to spend.
Today, the theater and its surrounding marshlands have become known more as a good place to dump corpses than to catch the latest play.
An Arizona bill that could leave many employees of religious schools and daycares ineligible for unemployment benefits is on the verge of becoming law.
American workers are being fired or laid off less often than at any time in the last decade, the government reported this week. But companies are also less willing to hire than they used to be.
The Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for February showed that during that month the total number of people who were either discharged or laid off totaled just 0.9 percent of all job holders in the United States. It was the first month since that survey began in 2000 that the figure dipped below 1 percent.
Over the most recent 12 months, the Labor Department figures show, only 15.1 percent of workers lost their jobs because of layoffs or discharges. Until this year, the lowest figure for any 12 months had been 15.3 percent, during the period ending in September 2006. That came as the economic boom was cresting before the recession that began at the end of 2007.
At the end of 2012, buyers bought homes that were three times their annual income, up from 2.6 times before the housing bubble.
The disparity is stark in high-priced areas such as San Jose, where home buyers are purchasing homes for seven times their yearly salary. Meanwhile, in Detroit, the purchase price is typically just 1.5 times a buyer’s salary.
Homes appear more affordable because low mortgage rates are painting a distorted picture of the market, said Stan Humphries, chief economist at Zillow.
France’s experiment with the Tobin Tax has proved a spectacular flop. Its finance ministry admits that the scattershot levy on financial transactions has raised just a third of the money expected since August.
Total takings will be a paltry €800m in 2013, but that overlooks the much greater damage inflicted on French finance, industry and the government’s own tax base. “France is shooting itself in the foot,” said Paul-Henri de La Porte du Theil, head of French finance industry AFG.
Jean-Yves Hocher from Crédit Agricole said it would cost his company €17bn. One French banker told Les Echos that the tax was “a weapon of mass destruction that is going to ruin our financial sector”.
Rick Benisasia, who’s in the after-death business, is looking to build an empire.
Mr. Benisasia runs a South Asian-focused funeral home on Derry Road in Malton and wants to open a crematorium beside it. The land, money and demand is there, he says.
For more than three years, he’s waited for his rezoning application to be approved by the City of Mississauga. But a new Mississauga bylaw passed in March says new crematoriums must be a minimum of 300 metres from residential properties, due to concerns over the health effects from their emissions.
Boeing Co. said today it will invest another $1 billion and add at least 2,000 jobs at its North Charleston 787 campus by 2020, citing steep demand for commercial airplanes over the next two decades.
The company’s “phase two” growth plans are expected to be part of in a bill to be introduced around noon in the General Assembly in Columbia.
Basically, she outlined the problems with the euro perfectly, that Germany would chafe at the inevitable need for greater inflation, and that the poorer countries would inevitably be uncompetitive and need bailouts that would not easily be forthcoming.
This paragraph is from “The Path To Power,” where she discusses conversations with John Major (her successor) about negotiating with the rest of Europe. She just totally nails the inflation and competitiveness angles….
The unexpectedly large number of American workers who piled into the Social Security Administration’s disability program during the recession and its aftermath threatens to cost the economy tens of billions a year in lost wages and diminished tax revenues.
Signs of the problem surfaced Friday, in a dismal jobs report that showed U.S. labor force participation rates falling last month to the lowest levels since 1979, the wrong direction for an economy that instead needs new legions of working men and women to drive growth and sustain a baby boomer generation headed to retirement.
Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist for J.P. Morgan, estimates that since the recession, the worker flight to the Social Security Disability Insurance program accounts for as much as a quarter of the puzzling drop in participation rates, a labor exodus with far-reaching economic consequences.
To hear Grier Allen tell it, BoomTown’s first office in the old Faber House on East Bay Street had rats.
Now several years on, the CEO’s workspace has a cinder block and glass brick wall and was once the seafood section of the former Jaber’s Market on Rutledge Avenue.
Moving a little over a mile in seven years, from live rodents to fish souls, might not scream success.
But Allen likes where he and his real estate software firm are. That’s because BoomTown has been covering ground in other ways. You might even say business is booming.
For students now sprinting toward the end of their college days, the finish line may not be much of a relief. More than ever, their gait is slowed by the weight of impending debt.
Thirty-seven million Americans share about $1 trillion in student loans, . It’s the besides mortgages, eclipsing both auto loans and credit cards. And on it grows, an appetite undiminished by the recession.
There are signs that students are catching on to the dangers, however. Dawit Lemma learned his own lessons about loans and is now passing them on to others. He’s the associate director of operations at the University of Maryland’s Office of Student Financial Aid.
Yummy Mummy, a little boutique on New York’s Upper East Side, has suddenly become a health care provider/online superstore. The company has been hiring like crazy, and just opened an online call center and a warehouse in Illinois. Yummy Mummy even hired somebody to talk to customers’ health insurance companies.
And new moms now seem more likely to splurge on fancy new breast pumps. Caroline Shany, a Yummy Mummy customer, spent her own money to buy a breast pump for her first baby. She may buy another one now because insurance will pick up the tab.
“Why not?” she says.
Opponents of same-sex marriage resist it because it amounts to redefining marriage, but also because it will invite future redefinitions. If we embrace same-sex marriage, they argue, society will have surrendered any reasonable grounds on which to continue forbidding polygamy, for example.
In truth, proponents of same-sex marriage have never offered a very good response to this concern. This problem was highlighted at the Supreme Court last week in oral argument over California’s Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union of a man and a woman.
Surprisingly, the polygamy problem that same-sex marriage presents was raised by an Obama appointee, the liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor interrupted the presentation of anti-Prop 8 litigator Theodore Olson to pose the following question: If marriage is a fundamental right in the way proponents of same-sex marriage contend, “what state restrictions could ever exist,” for example, “with respect to the number of people . . . that could get married?”
Erica Brown, a prominent rabbi in Washington, recently wrote an article complaining about a “customer service” problem in the Jewish community. “We walk into synagogues and schools . . . and no one says hello. Few know our names (maybe for months or years). A friend in an interfaith marriage says that when he takes his wife to shul, no one talks to them. When he goes to his wife’s church, everyone comes over to greet them.”
David Polonsky, director of communications at Adas, tells me that when he moved to Washington a few years ago and called around to find out about high-holiday services, he was told they would cost him hundreds of dollars. “I’m a young person calling them and asking them for a Jewish experience,” he recalls, yet no one asked for his name, let alone invited him to the synagogue. Shabbat-Hopping at least makes people feel welcome.
The conservative Adas Israel, the reform Washington Hebrew Congregation, and the nondenominational Sixth & I Historic Synagogue have all made a big deal of welcoming young professionals””even when there is no Shabbat-Hopping event.
American employers hired at the slowest pace in nine months in March, a sign that Washington’s austerity drive could be stealing momentum from the economy.
The economy added just 88,000 jobs last month and the jobless rate ticked a tenth of a point lower to 7.6 percent largely due to people dropping out of the work force, Labor Department data showed on Friday.
Analysts polled by Reuters had expected a gain of 200,000.
MarketWatch: Since Nixon’s “abomination” as you call it, we have had some periods where government spending to GDP actually went down, like during the Clinton era. Doesn’t that show it’s just the choices made by Congress rather than the Fed to blame [for the problem of rising national debt as a % of GDP]?
Stockman: There is the issue that Congress ultimately is the fiscal authority. But my argument is, when the Fed becomes a massive buyer of bonds and debt and artificially suppresses interest rate below market-clearing levels, it’s a terrible signal to the Congress that debt is cheap, that running deficits is a viable strategy. So therefore they are induced to kick the can, to let it drift and avoid hard choices. Who wants to tell the public you are going to take your broccoli of higher taxes and lower benefits and spending if you can issue debt on a three-year basis for 40 basis points. That’s free. I was in Congress, they don’t do decimal math, OK? And they think the money is free, it’s a bad problem philosophically, we shouldn’t be doing this for the great long run, but it’s no harm today.
Then they have professors like Krugman who give them the disingenuous advice that the bond vigilantes don’t care. The market is saying, “fine with us, we don’t care, keep piling the debt on, we love it.” That is so much baloney. The reason the interest rate on the 10-year bond 10_YEAR -0.33% today is 1.8% or whatever it happened to settle today, is the market knows the Fed is buying half of the debt and is front running the Fed. And it is renting the bond on repo, 98 cents on the dollar, based on overnight money that’s free thanks to Bubbles Ben as well.
The vast majority of U.S. businesses expanded at a slower pace, and private-sector firms hired less, adding to earlier warnings the economy is losing momentum.
The Institute for Supply Management said Wednesday its nonmanufacturing index fell to a seven-month low of 54.4 in March from 56 in February, indicating activity cooled off. Analysts expected it to remain steady. The report saw sharp decelerations in jobs, orders and exports.
ISM’s factory gauge out Monday also showed slowing growth .
Thanks largely to the U.S. Federal Reserve, Jeffrey Nelson was able to put up a shotgun as down payment on a car.
Money was tight last year for the school-bus driver and neighborhood constable in Jasper, Alabama, a beaten-down town of 14,000 people. One car had already been repossessed. Medical bills were piling up.
And still, though Nelson’s credit history was an unhappy one, local car dealer Maloy Chrysler Dodge Jeep had no problem arranging a $10,294 loan from Wall Street-backed subprime lender Exeter Finance Corp so Nelson and his wife could buy a charcoal gray 2007 Suzuki Grand Vitara.
The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.
A new fight is brewing over health insurance companies letting millions of Americans renew their current coverage for another year ”” and thereby avoid changes under the federal healthcare law.
That may offer a short-term benefit for certain consumers and shield some of those individual policyholders from potentially steep rate increases. But critics say this maneuver could undermine government efforts to remake the insurance market next year and keep premiums affordable overall.
At issue is a little-known loophole in President Obama’s landmark legislation that enables health insurers to extend existing policies for nearly all of 2014. This runs contrary to the widespread belief that all health insurance must immediately comply with new federal rules starting Jan. 1, when most provisions of the law take effect.
Unable to meet tight deadlines in the new health care law, the Obama administration is delaying parts of a program intended to provide affordable health insurance to small businesses and their employees ”” a major selling point for the health care legislation.
The law calls for a new insurance marketplace specifically for small businesses, starting next year. But in most states, employers will not be able to get what Congress intended: the option to provide workers with a choice of health plans. They will instead be limited to a single plan.
This choice option, already available to many big businesses, was supposed to become available to small employers in January. But administration officials said they would delay it to 2015 in the 33 states where the federal government will be running insurance markets known as exchanges. And they will delay the requirement for other states as well.
Richard Bejtlich was a cyber-specialist for the U.S. Air Force in the 1990s, a time when the U.S. military was going on the offense in the cyberwar. He remembers the day he realized how important a software vulnerability can be to a cyberweapons designer.
“Myself and a couple other guys, we found a zero day vulnerability in Cisco routing equipment,” Bejtlich recalls. “And we looked at it, and we said, ‘Did we really find this? Can we really get into these Cisco routers?'”
They could, and so Bejtlich and his colleagues reported it to Cisco. They thanked him and said they’d fix it. Days later, he was talking to some friends who worked on the offensive side of the unit, and they had quite a different reaction to them reporting the bug to Cisco.
“They said, ‘You did what? Why didn’t you tell us? We could have used this to get into all these various hard targets,'” he says.
Take interstate highways between South Carolina’s largest metropolitan areas and the scene remains similar ”” thick forests, meandering rivers and lush farms punctuated with thriving suburbs and vibrant downtowns.
Get off those interstates and something else emerges ”” towns where poverty rules, illiteracy passes to children like an inherited disease, and diabetes strikes 9-year-olds because of bad diets and obesity.
This is the other South Carolina. It runs along the “Interstate-95 Corridor” through the mostly majority black counties made infamous by the “Corridor of Shame” documentary about inequities in public schools. It also includes the “Mill Crescent,” the swath of rural, largely white, old textile mill counties between the I-85 economic powerhouse and greater Columbia.
If you took this other South Carolina away, the state would no longer rank at the bottom of nearly every list you want it to be at the top of. Instead, it would basically mirror the nation as a whole in income, education and health.
Many crippling disparities linger in these metropolitan counties, but the areas have been pushed into the national mainstream by four decades of economic growth, desegregation and an influx of people from other states and countries with new ideas and high expectations.
The other South Carolina remains shrouded in despair by the legacies of slavery, dependence on a marginally educated workforce, and political and economic domination by an elite few.
China surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s biggest trading nation last year as measured by the sum of exports and imports of goods, official figures from both countries show.
U.S. exports and imports of goods last year totaled $3.82 trillion, the U.S. Commerce Department said last week. China’s customs administration reported last month that the country’s trade in goods in 2012 amounted to $3.87 trillion.
If Steve Boedefeld graduates from Appalachian State University without any student loan debt, it will be because of the money he earned fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and the money he now saves by eating what he grows or kills.
Zack Tolmie managed to escape New York University with no debt ”” and a degree ”” by landing a job at Bubby’s, the brunch institution in TriBeCa, where he made $1,000 a week. And he had entered N.Y.U. with sophomore standing, thanks to Advanced Placement credits. All that hard work also yielded a $25,000 annual merit scholarship.
The two are part of a rare species on college campuses these days, as the nation’s collective student loan balance hits $1 trillion and continues to rise. While many students are trying to defray some of the costs, few can actually work their way through college in a normal amount of time without debt and little or no need-based financial aid unless they have an unusual combination of bravery, luck and discipline.
1 Kings 18:21 describes a crucial moment of decision. It’s the final showdown between the God of Israel and a false god called Baal. Elijah calls God’s people to choose once and for all between the living God who delivered them, and this false god who has captured their affections: “‘How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.’ But the people said nothing.”
They seem unable, or unwilling, to make a choice. They want to hedge their bets, sit on the fence, and keep their options open. How different are we Christians in the 21st century? Would you prefer to make an ironclad, no-turning-back choice, or one you could back out of if need be? Do you ever find that you’re afraid to commit? Do you reply to party invitations with a “maybe” rather than a “yes” or “no”? Do you like to keep your smartphone switched on at all times, even in meetings, so that you are never fully present at any given moment? Will you focus on the person you’re talking to after a church service, or will you look over her shoulder for a better conversation partner?
If so, you may be worshiping the god of open options.
On Jan. 30, the Obama administration unveiled a long list of exemptions from the ObamaCare insurance mandate. Flaws and contradictions in the law will cause millions of people to be uninsured. The administration also estimated that the cheapest family plan will cost $20,000 by 2016. This new information indicates that the Affordable Care Act is failing in both goals: making insurance affordable and covering the uninsured.
Children are the biggest victims. The hastily drafted law, passed before it was read, overlooked them.
The law says that beginning in 2014, employers with 50 or more full-time employees must offer coverage or pay a penalty. The law’s sloppy drafting left it unclear whether that meant worker’s coverage or family coverage.
Read it all from IBD.
Budget constraints are prompting the U.S. Navy to cut back the number of aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf region from two to one, the latest example of how contentious fiscal battles in Washington are impacting the U.S. military.
According to Defense Department officials, the USS Harry S. Truman, which was set to leave for the Persian Gulf region on Friday, will now remain stateside, based in Norfolk, Virginia.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered the change to the department’s “two-carrier policy” in the Persian Gulf region early Wednesday.
What was happening to black families in the ’60s can be reinterpreted today not as an indictment of the black family but as a harbinger of a larger collapse of traditional living arrangements””of what demographer Samuel Preston, in words that Moynihan later repeated, called “the earthquake that shuddered through the American family.”
That earthquake has not affected all American families the same way. While the Moynihan report focused on disparities between white and black, increasingly it is class, and not just race, that matters for family structure. Although blacks as a group are still less likely to marry than whites, gaps in family formation patterns by class have increased for both races, with the sharpest declines in marriage rates occurring among the least educated of both races. For example, in 1960, 76 percent of adults with a college degree were married, compared to 72 percent of those with a high school diploma””a gap of only 4 percentage points. By 2008, not only was marriage less likely, but that gap had quadrupled, to 16 percentage points, with 64 percent of adults with college degrees getting married compared to only 48 percent of adults with a high school diploma. A report from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia summed up the data well: “Marriage is an emerging dividing line between America’s moderately educated middle and those with college degrees.” The group for whom marriage has largely disappeared now includes not just unskilled blacks but unskilled whites as well. Indeed, for younger women without a college degree, unwed childbearing is the new normal.
These differences in family formation are a problem not only for those concerned with “family values” per se, but also for those concerned with upward mobility in a society that values equal opportunity for its children.