Article 43
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Suicide At AT&T
Bridgewater man jumps to death from AT&T complex building
NJ DOT COM
August 16, 2010
A Bridgewater man jumped to his death Friday at AT&T, where he worked, authorities said today.
Ralph Merritt, 46, was pronounced dead at the scene, said acting Somerset County Prosecutor A. Peter DeMarco Jr.
At 11:34 a.m. Friday, Bedminster police responded to “Building B” at the AT&T complex, located at One AT&T Way, after being notified that a male employee had jumped from the fifth floor to the atrium below, DeMarco said.
Detectives from Bedminster, the prosecutors Major Crimes Squad and members of the New Jersey Northern Regional Medical Examiners Office responded to the scene, along with medics and emergency medical technicians from Somerset Medical Center. The preliminary investigation has determined Merritt’s death was a SUICIDE, the prosecutor said. The medical examiners office will conduct a post mortem examination. DeMarco would not comment on WHAT PROMPTED Merritt to KILL HIMSELF.
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Monday, August 23, 2010
The Doomed US Homeowner
Housing Fades as a Means to Build Wealth, Analysts Say
By David Streitfeld
NY Times
August 23, 2010
Housing will eventually recover from its great swoon. But many real estate experts now believe that HOME OWNERSHIP will never again yield rewards like those enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century, when houses not only provided shelter but also a plump nest egg.
The wealth generated by housing in those decades, particularly on the coasts, did more than assure the owners a comfortable retirement. It powered the economy, paying for the education of children and grandchildren, keeping the cruise ships and golf courses full and the restaurants humming.
More than likely, that era is gone for good.
There is no iron law that real estate must appreciate,” said Stan Humphries, chief economist for the real estate site Zillow. “All those theories advanced during the boom about why housing is special - that more people are choosing to spend more on housing, that more people are moving to the coasts, that we were running out of usable land didn’t hold up.”
Instead, Mr. Humphries and other economists say, housing values will only keep up with inflation. A home will return the money an owner puts in each month, but will not multiply the investment.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, estimates that it will take 20 years to recoup the $6 trillion of housing wealth that has been lost since 2005. After adjusting for inflation, values will never catch up.
ԓPeople shouldnt look at a home as a way to make money because it wonҒt, Mr. Baker said.
If the long term is grim, the short term is grimmer. Housing experts are bracing themselves for Tuesday, when the sales figures for July will be released. The data is expected to show a drop of as much as 20 percent from last year.
The supply of homes sitting on the market might rise to as much as 12 months, about twice the level of a healthy market. That would push down prices as all those sellers compete to secure a buyer, adding to a slide that has already chopped off as much as 30 percent in home values.
Set against this dismal present and a bleak future, buying a home is a willful act of optimism. That explains why Adam and Allison Lyons are waiting to close on a $417,500 house in Deerfield, Ill.
“Were trying not to think too far ahead,” said Ms. Lyons, 35, an information technology manager.
The couples first venture into real estate came in 2003 when they bought a condo in a 17-unit building under construction in Chicago. By the time they moved in two years later, it was already worth $50,000 more than they had paid. ғWe were thinking, great! said Mr. Lyons, 34.
That quick appreciation started them on the same track as their parents, who watched the value of their houses ascend for decades. The real estate crash interrupted that pleasant dream. The couple cannot sell their condo. Unwillingly, they are becoming landlords.
‘I don’t think we’re ever going to see the prosperity our parents did, but I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom either,” said Mr. Lyons, a manager at I.B.M. “At some point, you just have to say what the heck and go for it”.
Other buyers have grand and even grander expectations.
In an annual survey conducted by the economists Robert J. Shiller and Karl E. Case, hundreds of new owners in four communities ԗ Alameda County near San Francisco, Boston, Orange County south of Los Angeles, and Milwaukee once again said they believed prices would rise about 10 percent a year for the next decade.
With minor swings in sentiment, the latest results reflect what new buyers always seem to feel. At the boomגs peak in 2005, they said prices would go up. When the market was sliding in 2008, they still said prices would go up.
“People think it’s a law of nature,” said Mr. Shiller, who teaches at Yale.
For the first half of the 20th century, he said, expectations followed the opposite path. Houses were seen the way cars are now: as a consumer durable that the buyer eventually used up.
The notion of housing as an investment first began to blossom after World War II, when the nesting urges of returning soldiers created a construction boom. Demand was stoked as their bumper crop of children grew up and bought places of their own. The inflation of the 1970s, which increased the value of hard assets, and liberal tax policies both helped make housing a good bet. So did the long decline in mortgage rates from the early 1980s.
Despite all these tailwinds, prices rose modestly for much of the period. Real home prices increased 1.1 percent a year after inflation, according to Mr. ShillerԒs research.
By the late 1990s, however, the rate was 4 percent a year. Happy homeowners were taking about $100 billion a year out of their houses, which paid for a lot of good times.
The experience we had from the late 1970s to the late 1990s was an aberration,Ӕ said Barry Ritholtz of the equity research firm Fusion IQ. People shouldnӒt be holding their breath waiting for it to happen again.
Not everyone views the notion of real appreciation in real estate as a lost cause.
Bob Walters, chief economist of the online mortgage firm Quicken, acknowledges that the recent collapse will create a ԓmind scar just as the Great Depression did. But he argues that housing remains unique.
ԓYou have to live somewhere, he said. ԓIn three or four years, people will resume a normal course, and home values will continue to increase.
All homes are different, and some neighborhoods and regions will rebound more quickly. On the other hand, areas where there was intense overbuilding, like Arizona, will be extremely slow to show any sign of renewal.
ԓIts entirely likely that markets like Arizona will not recover even in the 15- to 20-year time frame,Ҕ said Mr. Humphries of Zillow. The demand doesnӒt exist.
Owners in those foreclosure-plagued areas consider themselves lucky if they are still solvent. But that does not prevent the occasional regret that a life-changing sum of money was so briefly within their grasp.
Robert Austin, a Phoenix lawyer, paid $200,000 for his home in 2000. Five years later, his neighbors listed a similar home for $500,000.
Freedom beckoned. ԓI thought, when my daughter gets out of school, I can sell the house and buy a boat and sail around the world, said Mr. Austin, 56.
His home is now worth about what he paid for it. As for that cruise, ԓit may be a while, Mr. Austin said. Showing the hopefulness that is apparently innate to homeowners, he added: ԓBut I wont rule it out forever.Ҕ
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Sunday, August 22, 2010
Deceptive Economic Statistics
While the economists lied the US economy died
By Paul Craig Roberts
Information Clearing House
August 18, 2010
On August 17, Bloomberg reported a US government release that industrial production rose twice as much as forecast, climbing 1 percent. Bloomberg interpreted this to mean that increased business investment is propelling the gains in manufacturing, which accounts for 11 percent of the world’s largest economy.
The stock market rose.
LET’S LOOK at this through the lens of statistician John Williams of SHADOWSTATS. Williams reports that the primary driver of a 1.0% monthly gain in seasonally-adjusted July industrial production was warped seasonal factors caused by the irregular patterns in U.S. auto production in the last two years. Industrial production shrank by 1.0% before seasonal adjustments.
If the government and Bloomberg had announced that industrial production fell by 1.0% in July, would the stock market have risen 104 points on August 17?
Notice that Bloomberg reports that manufacturing accounts for 11 percent of the US ECONOMY. I remember when manufacturing accounted for 18% of the US economy. The decline of 39% is due to jobs OFFSHORING.
Think about that. Wall Street and shareholders and executives of transnational corporations have made billions by moving 39% of US manufacturing offshore to boost the GDP and employment of foreign countries, such as China, while impoverishing their former American work force. Congress and the economics profession have cheered this on as the New Economy.
Bought-and-paid-for-economists TOLD US that the “new economy” would make us all rich, and so did the financial press. We were well rid, they claimed, of the old industries and manufactures, the departure of which destroyed the tax base of so many American cities and states and the livelihood of millions of Americans.
The bought-and-paid-for-economists got all the media forums for a decade. While they lied, the US economy died.
Now, back to statistical deception. On August 17 the census Bureau reported a small gain in July 2010 residential construction housing starts. More hope orchestrated. In fact, the gain, as John Williams reports, was due to a large downward revision in June’s reporting. The reported July gain would have been a contraction without the downward revision in June’s gain.
So, the overestimate of June housing not only made June look good, but also the downward correction of the June number makes July look good, because starts rose above the corrected June number. The same manipulation is likely to happen again next month.
If the government will lie to you about Iraqi weapons of mass production, Iranian nukes, and 9/11, why won’t they lie to you about the economy?
We now have an all-time high of Americans on food stamps, 40.8 million people, about 14% of the population. By next year the government estimates that food stamp dependency will rise to 43 million Americans. So last week Congress cut food stamp benefits. Let them eat cake.
Wherever one looks--food stamps, home foreclosures, bankrupted states, mounting joblessness, the message to long-suffering Americans from their governmentӔ is the same: go eat cake, while we fight wars for Israel that enrich the military/security complex and while we bail out banksters whose annual incomes are in the tens of millions of dollars and up.
It is impossible to get any truth out of the US government about anything. If private companies used US government accounting, the executives would be prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated.
Our governmentӔ is committed to fighting wars to enrich the military/security complex and Israels territorial expansion at the expense of cuts in Social Security and Medicare.
All most members of Congress, especially Republicans, want to do is to pay for the pointless wars by cutting Social Security and Medicare.
When they worry about the deficit, it is usually Social Security and Medicare--so-called “entitlements” that are in the crosshairs.
You don’t have to be smart to see that Wall Streets and the government’s response to the amazing US budget deficit is not to stop the senseless wars and bailouts of mega-millionaires, but to cut entitlements.
I will end this column on unemployment. Our government tells us that the unemployment rate is just under 10 percent, a figure that would have wrecked any post-Great Depression administration. But, again, our government is LYING. The reported UNEMPLOYMENT RATE is just below 10% because the US government no longer, since the corrupt Clinton administration, counts Americans who have been unemployed for longer than one year. Once the unemployed hit one year and one day, they are dropped from the unemployment roles and no longer counted as unemployed.
Compare this fact with the number you read from the financial press. Right now, if measured according to the methodology of 1980, the US unemployment rate is about 22%. Thus, the reported rate of unemployment hides more than half of the unemployed.
And Secretary Treasury Tim Geithner welcomed us in the August 2 New York Times to the recovery.
Utterly amazing.
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Missing workers not counted
By Heidi Shierholz
Ecomic Policy Institute
August 20, 2010
The July unemployment rate held steady at 9.5% in July, but the primary reason it did not rise is that the labor force shrank by 181,000 workers. This points to the backlog of missing workers, who dropped out of, or never entered the labor force during the downturn. In the last three months, the labor force has declined by 1.2 million workers, reversing much of the 1.7 million increase in the labor force in the first four months of the year. This clearly shows how the forward momentum from earlier this year has largely evaporated.
To get an idea of the size of the current backlog of missing workers, consider the following: The labor force should have increased by around 3.6 million workers between December 2007 and July 2010, given that the working-age population grew over this period. Instead the size of the labor force actually decreased by 309,000. This means that the pool of “missing workers now numbers around 3.9 million, none of whom are reflected in the official unemployment count. As these workers enter or re-enter the labor force in search of work, this will contribute to keeping the unemployment rate high.
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Friday, August 20, 2010
Furlough Friday
State agencies close as workers go on furlough in California
CNN
August 20, 2010
Closed signs went up at CALIFORNIA agencies Friday as a mandatory furlough went into effect for government employees in an effort to resolve the state’s $19 billion budget deficit.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, according to the governor’s office, ordered state workers to take three unpaid days off per month until a new budget is in place and the Department of Finance certifies that California has enough cash to meet its financial obligations through the end of the fiscal year.
The furloughs were to have started August 1 but were temporarily blocked by a lower court decision. But Wednesday, the state Supreme Court allowed the furloughs to resume.
The Professional Engineers in California Government union, which had previously sued on the grounds that the governor did not have the authority to furlough employees, said it will urge the supreme court to rule that the furloughs are illegal. Employees are entitled to full paychecks, the union said in a statement.
The furloughs affect about 150,000 state employees and will save $150 million a month, the governors office said.
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Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Boomers Burned By Recession Part 3
Boomers wanting to work past retirement age find limited options
By Christine Dugas,
USA Today
August 10,2010
Baby Boomers approaching retirement age are in for a rude awakening.
Many want to keep working, knowing that they likely will live well into their 80s and 90s, stay healthier than previous generations and need more cash to keep paying the bills.
However, for Boomers those 79 million Americans born from 1946 through 1964 ח “the new retirement reality may be a messy proposition,” says Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
Jobs are scarce and many employers AREN’T WILLING to hire older workers. Boomers who do land jobs often must settle for ones that are less fulfilling than desired.
Gilbert Brooks knows the drill firsthand.
The harsh reality hit him in 2008 when his employer, a trucking company in Memphis, was sold and he was forced into early retirement.
“I worked in transportation sales and marketing for 35 years,” says Brooks, 66. “I am highly qualified.”
But two years and 12 job interviews later, he is still unemployed.
Six months after Brooks was laid off, his wife, Ann, 70, lost her job as a secretary and receptionist for real estate closing lawyers.
“We were both actively looking for jobs but finally just gave up,” he says. “You get so tired of the rejection.”
The Brookses’ story is familiar at a time when the unemployment rate for workers 55 and older has jumped from 3% in the second quarter of 2008 to 7% in the second quarter this year. That adds up to about 2.1 million unemployed older Americans. And that doesn’t include people like the Brookses who no longer are counted in unemployment figures because they’ve given up seeking work and have applied for Social Security.
Longer job searches
Many experts predict that unemployment rates will remain high for the next few years. That’s not good news for older Americans who have seen their retirement savings shrink.
“It’s very hard to look people in the eye and say, ‘Go out and work longer, or get a job,’ “ Munnell says.
Exacerbating the problem is the reality that employers are not eager to retain or hire older workers, she says. That had started to change in the mid-2000s as businesses, anticipating labor shortages as the Baby Boom generation retired, started hiring more older Americans, Munnell says.
Then the RECESSION hit in late 2007.
Now it takes much longer for older, unemployed workers to find a job. In February, jobless workers 55 and older were pounding the payment for 35 weeks 10 weeks longer than those ages 16 to 24.
Margaret Allen, 67, is one of the lucky ones. When she lost her job about three years ago, she was quickly hired again. She now works full time, handling medical billing at the Women’s Health Alliance in Dallas, and has no plans to stop working.
Half of Baby Boomers expect to work into their 70s, according to a survey of 400 Boomers by First Command Financial Services in May. The chief reason they give: a desire to stay busy and intellectually engaged.
Money also appears to be a driving force. Older Baby Boomers have been hit hard by the stock market slump and the recession. Instead of counting on a pension plan to fund their retirement as previous generations did, many Boomers must rely on 401(k) plans whose values dropped along with the stock market.
Nearly half of Baby Boomers ages 56 to 62 are at risk of not having enough savings for basic expenses and uninsured medical bills, according to Employee Benefit Research Institute’s new Retirement Readiness Rating. And 41% of the lowest-income older Boomers ח those who are expected to earn $11,711 or less at age 64 are likely to run short of money after 10 years of retirement.
“Being close to retirement has become a nightmare,” says Darryl Rodgers, 55, a quality assurance inspector at Gatorade in Atlanta. Rodgers wants to keep working but has chronic back problems. His wife, Geraldine, has been out of work for nearly four years. And they’re still paying down their home mortgage.
“After not being properly prepared prior to the recession and the stock market crash, it seems like (retirement) will not be a possibility, even by age 62,” Rodgers says.
Retirement goals have changed. Not long ago, many older Americans wanted to retire at an early age, move to a retirement community and relax.
“We have a manufactured vision of what retirement is, and that doesn’t necessarily correlate with reality,” says Margaret Allen’s husband, Paul, 64, who has his own business as a software developer in Dallas. “Unless you have a well-thought-out scenario, you’re going to be in for a shock at retirement.”
About half of retirees follow a non-traditional path, according to a 2009 study by Nicole Maestas, an economist at the Rand Corp. Before they even reached retirement age, they had planned to stay in the labor force, working part time or finding a new career.
But some others have learned only after they retired that it was a mistake.
Matt Beha, 69, retired in January 2001 from his job as a communications representative for the state of Michigan. By the end of the year, he had decided to go back to work.
“I discovered that I needed to be around people more,” says Beha, who lives in Dimondale, Mich. He now works part time at Lansing Community College.
The extra money also allowed him to help his two sons ח one a registered nurse, the other a computer programmer after they were laid off. The recession clearly affects whole families, as unemployed children move back home with older parents or need financial assistance.
“Our generation thought that we would have everything better than our parents, and it’s not turning out that way for a lot of us,” Beha says.
The new retirement reality is affecting everyone, from affluent to low-income workers.
“Somebody who was a senior executive at a company for 30 years generally is not somebody who will be happy golfing,” says Amelia Warren Tyagi, co-founder of Business Talent Group, which provides companies with temporary, top-tier professionals, including older workers.
“I hear over and over their desire to do interesting and engaging work,” she says. But they want an alternative, such as working as a temporary consultant or a board member.
Help for seniors
Across the United States, AARP has been sponsoring career fairs for older Americans. Earlier this year, about 6,000 people attended one in Cleveland.
“In some areas where industries are disappearing, it’s not just about finding another job. It’s about contemplating doing something completely different,” says Deborah Russell, AARP director of workforce issues.
And 15 community colleges have received grants to develop programs for students over 50. Among the programs are pharmacy tech, nursing assistant and computer skills.
“Some are shifting jobs because they are burned out by what they have done for 30 years,” says Mary McKee, vice president of continuing education at Century College in St. Cloud, Minn.
Even older Americas at the poverty level can get help from the federal Senior Community Service Employment Program. People who are over 50 and have been unemployed for more than six months are eligible. The AARP Foundation receives SCSEP grants to upgrade participants’ skills, provide a stipend for temporary volunteer work, and help them get a job.
George Dorsett, 69, retired in 2005, but when the stock market slumped, his savings plummeted, forcing him to go back to work. He went through the Manhattan SCSEP program in 2007 and now works full time as the operations manager at AARP Foundation WorkSearch.
“I don’t think I’d retire again,” he says. “Your mind doesn’t get fed enough information to keep you vibrant and alive.”
“Working after retirement is not the same. It’s a different mind-set,” Margaret Allen says.
“There is a girl who sits next to me and comes in at the last minute every day. Then she proceeds to put her makeup on. That’s foreign to me. I enjoy what I do, and I always get to work early.”
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