The top two charts above display monthly jobless rates by gender, and the third chart displays employment levels by gender, with the following key points:1. Between 2002 and 2007, jobless rates were roughly equal by gender, except during the "jobless recovery" of 2002-2003 when male unemployment exceeded female unemployment, but never by more than 0.9% (July 2003). 2. Male unemployment reached 11.4% in October 2009, a record all-time postwar jobless rate high for men, exceeding the previous record high of 11.2% in December 1982.3. Female unemployment is currently at 8.8%, and has been at that level for four out of the last eight months, but never higher. That's far below the record-high female jobless rate of 10.4% set in December 1982. 4. The May 2010 male-female jobless rate gap of 1.7% (10.5% male vs. 8.8% female) is down from the postwar record-high gap of 2.7% last August, but is still very high by historical standards. During (or following) the three previous recessions (1981-82, 1990-91, 2001), the peak male-female jobless rate gap averaged about 1%, and never exceeded 1.2% (April 1983). 5. During the 1970s, the female unemployment rate was generally higher than the male rate, and jobless rate gaps exceeded 2% during recessions, but in favor of men (see middle chart). 6. Between December 2007 and December 2009, household employment fell by almost 8.38 million jobs, and 68.5% of those were jobs held by men (5.74 million) and 31.5% were jobs held by women (2.64 million). During this two-year period, 217 men lost their jobs for every 100 women who lost jobs. Read more here about The Great Mancession of 2008-2009 (and it's still not yet over).
"An increasing number of Cubans are disillusioned with socialism and are demanding change. One of the tools that Cubans are now using to recover their freedom of expression and association is the Internet, which has quickly given rise to a community of cyber-dissidents, despite the Cuban government’s efforts to make Internet use difficult. Now that the state is out of money and there are no more rights to exchange for benefits, the demand for freedom is on the rise.One of the tools that has helped people recover the opportunity to air their opinions is the Internet. Although a common citizen cannot contract for Internet at home, and the price of an hour’s connection in a public place exceeds two weeks’ wages, a web of networks has emerged as the only means by which a person on the island can make his opinions known to the rest of the world. Today, this virtual space is like a training camp where Cubans go to relearn forgotten freedoms. The right of association can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networks, in a sort of compensation for the crime of “unlawful assembly” established by the Cuban penal code.In a printed newspaper or magazine, on the radio or television, it is still impossible to publicize opinions that stray from the trite official script, but once connected to the Internet, many possibilities open up. Up until now, the most used are the independent blogs that have begun to appear. Most of the “direct readers” are abroad, and from there they email the articles and posts they like to their friends and family in Cuba, who copy and multiply them. The bloggers, for their part, put copies of their work on CDs and even distribute them on flash drives. Television stations received by illegal satellite report on the contents of the blogs and conduct interviews, showing the faces of the bloggers. In this way, in less than a year, a community of cyber-dissidents was created — a blogostroika, as it is also called."~From Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez's article "Freedom and Exchange in Communist Cuba," published by the Cato Institute.
Highlights from the DQNews report on May California home sales:1. In May, 40,965 houses and condos were sold statewide, which was an increase of 9.3 percent from April (28,111), and up 4.9 percent from the 37,967 houses sold in May 2009 (see chart). 2. The median price for a California home sold in May was $278,000, up 9 percent from $255,000 in April and up 20.9 percent from $230,000 last May (see chart). 3. The year-over-year increase was the seventh in a row (starting in November 2009, which is likely the bottom for home prices in CA), following 27 months of year-over-year declines. 4. Of the existing homes sold in May, 35.5 percent were properties that had been foreclosed on during the past year, down from 38.1 percent in April and down from 50.2 percent a year ago (see chart). The last time foreclosure resales were as low was in March 2008, 27 months ago. MP: This report seems to have all of the key ingredients of a real estate market in full recovery mode: 1) increasing unit sales, 2) increasing median home prices for seven consecutive months, and 3) declining foreclosed homes as a share of sales (27-month low).
"The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behavior is sufficiently rational to allow predictions to be made. Just as no physicist would claim that "water runs uphill," no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores." ~James M. Buchanan, 1986 Nobel laureate in economics, writing in the Wall Street Journal on April 25, 1996
The chart above shows monthly shipping volume (TEUs = twenty-foot equivalent units, data here) at the Port of Seattle (America's 10th largest port, and third largest port on the West Coast). As might be expected, shipping at the Seattle port is dominated by trade with China, to the extent that more than half (56%) of the shipping volume (by dollar amount) is with China, and the almost $19 billion of shipping with China in 2009 was more than the value of shipping with the next 100 countries combined. Shipping volume for May (198,175 TEUs) was 57.4% above last year's shipping in May, and this follows year-to-year increases of 57.2% in April, 39.4% in March, 48.2% in February and 21.7% in January. Year-to-date, shipping volume at the Seattle port in 2010 is above last year by 44.3%. At this pace, annual Seattle shipping in 2010 will likely exceed both last year's shipping volume of 1.58 million TEUs and the 1.7 million TEUs in 2008.
This CD post that featured a video on the job-killing impact of minimum wage laws generated some lively discussion, so I thought I would post the chart above showing evidence of the adverse effects of raising the minimum wage in the U.S. by 41% between 2007 and 2009. Of course, unemployment rates in general rose in 2008 and and 2009 due to the recession, so the chart above shows the "excess teenage unemployment" by taking the difference between: a) the teenage unemployment rate (data here) and b) the overall U.S. unemployment rate, i.e. teenage unemployment rate MINUS the overall unemployment rate. The "excess teenage unemployment rate" rose by about 5 percentage points, from about 11% to 16% following the 41% increase in the minimum wage from $5.15 in early 2007 to $7.25 by mid-2009. Bottom Line: As much as politicians and other advocates of the minimum wage might pretend otherwise, the laws of supply and demand (like the law of gravity) are NOT optional.
"Even as the U.S. economy struggles to emerge from last year’s recession, many large businesses are growing enough to hire hundreds of new employees. Forbes and Indeed.com, a website that aggregates job listings from online classifieds and company websites, compiled a list of the 10 companies with more than 2,500 employees that have the most job postings right now."HT: Steve Bartin
