Saturday, February 4, 2012
Atlantic International Partnership Madrid Local News and Latest Events
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Employers in the United States added 200,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday, a report that came on the heels of a flurry of heartening economic news and signaled gathering momentum in the recovery. Consumer confidence lifted, factories stepped up production and small businesses showed signs of life.
The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent, its lowest level in nearly three years. It was the sixth consecutive month that the economy showed a net gain of more than 100,000 jobs — not enough to restore employment to prerecession levels but enough, perhaps, to cheer President Obama as he enters the election year. No sitting president has won re-election with an employment rate at 8.5 percent, but Mr. Obama is calculating that he can make a credible argument that he took over a country in an economic disaster and slowly walked it back.
Still, his response to the jobs report was more tempered than triumphant. “We have made real progress,” Mr. Obama said during a visit to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “Now is not the time to stop.” He called on Congress to extend a payroll tax cut that is set to expire at the end of February. Mr. Obama apparently does not want to repeat the mistake of overenthusiasm. In early 2010 and again in early 2011, the White House was quick to trumpet the news when the economy made moves toward recovery that turned out to be feints, going so far as to refer to the summer of 2010 as “recovery summer.”
There are reasons for caution. Many economists do not expect growth in 2012 to keep up the pace of the fourth quarter of last year. Expectations are generally positive, but very modest. And the president remains vulnerable to attack on his economic record. “This president doesn’t understand how the economy works,” Mitt Romney, the winner of this week’s Republican caucus in Iowa, said at a campaign stop in South Carolina shortly after the jobs report was released.
But economists like Markus Schomer of PineBridge Investments now have a much rosier view than they had back in August, after a spring and summer of lost economic ground and a demoralizing political debate over the nation’s debt ceiling. At that time, Mr. Schomer thought, as many did, that government dysfunction was paralyzing the economy. Now, he is ratcheting up his growth forecast for 2012.
“The improving trend in the U.S. labor markets is not just a temporary blip, but seems to be something quite sustainable,” he said. Which is not to say that there are no potential headwinds — last year’s signs of momentum were dashed by global factors like gas prices and the earthquake in Japan.
“I’m a little bit concerned that Iran could be this year’s Japan,” Mr. Schomer said. Among the pieces of good news in Friday’s report is that the drop in the jobless rate came largely from real gains, not from discouraged workers giving up the job hunt. The new jobs were spread broadly across industries, with transportation and warehousing, retail, manufacturing and restaurants all adding jobs. In addition, average wages on private payrolls ticked up by 4 cents an hour, though over the year wages have not kept pace with inflation. And government downsizing, which has been a drag on the jobs numbers, slowed in December, with only 12,000 public jobs lost. The private sector added 212,000 jobs.
In another positive sign, the unemployment rate seemed to be dropping at a faster rate than the number of new jobs would imply. New businesses and the newly self-employed are less likely to be counted by the Labor Department’s survey of businesses, from which the job numbers are drawn, than by the department’s survey of households, from which the unemployment rate is calculated.
The December rate of 8.5 percent was down from a revised 8.7 percent in November. A broader measure of unemployment, which includes people who can find only part-time work and people who have stopped looking for work, declined to 15.2 percent. A year earlier, it was 16.6 percent. Over the same period, the United States added 1.6 million jobs. Economists continued to warn of potential dangers ahead, including the crisis in the euro zone, increased tensions with Iran which could lead to higher gas prices and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts.
Congress could decline to continue extensions of the payroll tax break and unemployment benefits that have given spending a boost. Loans are still hard to obtain, and home prices have continued to fall. Still, context is everything. The same modest upward trends that a few months ago were dismissed as far too anemic to be noticeable are now greeted with tentative praise.
“People were very much thinking that the sky was falling,” said Tom Porcelli, chief United States economist at RBC Capital Markets. “It’s no small victory that we’re up here, even with all these headwinds.” Economists suggested that the good news and consumer confidence might feed off each other, leading to further increases in spending that, they hope, will be followed by the wage increases necessary to sustain that spending. Bullish types were quick to trumpet the American economy’s resilience.
Services Retirement Planning
http://www.atlanticinternationalpartnership.com/services/retirement-planning.html
n today’s economic climate retirement is becoming an important concern for all of us. On average we are living longer and that means more retirement years to plan for, to save and invest for. As the old welfare systems designed to provide pensions crumble under the strain of increasing life expectancy, we at AIP realize that this is a crucial factor to account for in all of our clients financial panning.
What are the costs of retirement:
- Projected living costs
- Current assets set aside for retirement
- Current savings and investment programs
- Projected rates of inflation
How should you prepare for retirement? AIP advisers are here to help you understand and feel better about achieving a secure financial future. Our advisors will show you how to diversify your investment assets without any of the stress involved.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Atlantic International Partnership World News and: Atlantic International Partnership Headlines: MF S...
Atlantic International Partnership World News and: Atlantic International Partnership Headlines: MF S...: "The International Monetary Fund said Spain must step up efforts to overhaul its economy as Europe ’s sovereign-debt crisis threatens to da..."
Atlantic International Partnership Headlines: MF Says Spain Must Step Up Reform Efforts as Euro Region’s Crisis Worsens
The International Monetary Fund said Spain must step up efforts to overhaul its economy as Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis threatens to damp growth.
“The repair of the economy is incomplete and risks are considerable,” the Washington-based IMF said in its annual appraisal of Spain yesterday. There must be “no let-up in the reform momentum” to bolster the recovery and reduce a 21 percent unemployment rate that is “unacceptably high,” the fund said.
Spain’s Socialist government is carrying out the deepest budget cuts in at least three decades while raising the retirement age and reducing firing costs. Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero overhauled wage-bargaining rules on June 10 in the latest step aimed at reining in borrowing costs that surged to the highest in a decade last week on mounting expectations of a Greek default.
“Financial conditions could deteriorate further, reflecting rising concerns about sovereign risks in the euro area,” the IMF said. “This could put additional pressure on sovereign and bank funding costs for Spain, which in turn could feed back to the real economy.”
The IMF called on the government, which has passed two labor overhauls in the past year, to make deeper changes to reduce the highest unemployment rate in Europe.
‘Underlying Problems’
“Some of the underlying problems of the Spanish economy, especially weak productivity growth and the dysfunctional labor market, remain to be fully addressed,” the IMF said. It called for “further enhancing the credibility of fiscal consolidation, completing financial-sector reform” and “boldly strengthening the reforms of the labor market.”
Finance Minister Elena Salgado said the IMF report is “extraordinarily positive.” The fund said that authorities “undertook a series of measures targeting the main economic problems facing the country.”
“I don’t see here that they are telling us that we have to make changes,” Salgado said in a telephone interview yesterday in Madrid. “The core of the labor reforms is in place already.”
Atlantic International Partnership World News and: Atlantic International Partnership Headlines: Supr...
Atlantic International Partnership World News and: Atlantic International Partnership Headlines: Supr...: "The fight over global warming and whether to limit carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants must be resolved by the Environmental Prote..."
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