Пока европа турит по Франции Америкосы настоящие как патриоты работают бесплатно, платят по долгам, несут депозиты в банки, правда сцуки не покупают новые левайсы и харлеи)
With U.S. unemployment at a 20-year high, some Americans are working for free while looking for a job, but experts are split over whether it is a sign of dedication or desperation.
Unpaid job seekers can keep their resumes fresh by boosting their experience and learning new skills, experts say, but others warn businesses may take advantage of the jobless and that it is illegal for commercial companies not to pay workers.
Dana Lin, 22, is one of the 14.7 million unemployed workers in the United States. She lost her marketing job at a technology company near San Francisco in April and since then has been working for free for about five hours a week for Internet company Jobnob.com."Every company has thousands of people applying for each job, and I realized I needed more appeal," said Lin, a graduate of Cornell University.Since being laid off, she has applied unsuccessfully for about 50 jobs."In some cases companies might be getting the better end of it (by having unpaid workers)," she said. "But it's nice to have something occupy yourself with and when speaking to prospective employers it's nice to say 'I haven't just been sitting around all day, I've actually been doing something."'
It's not only the unemployed taking on free work. Some employed people are being asked by bosses to go without pay.Some companies and U.S. state and city governments have made staff take unpaid furloughs, but some employees still work anyway to keep up or because they are worried about losing their job."The more desperate people get, they will do things like this to try and make themselves more appealing to an employer," he said. "The short-term prospects for most of the unemployed are very bad. They aren't going to be made much better by working off the books or working for nothing." Madeline Laurano, principal analyst at workplace research and advisory firm Bersin and Associates, argued that the recession-spurred trend of working for free is a great way for companies to build a "talent pipeline" to tap when the economy recovers.
"Employers need to think about the same strategies that they would if they were hiring someone who was getting paid. You still want a quality person," Laurano said. "Job seekers also need to think the same way, 'I still want to invest my time in a company I believe in, that I can grow and learn from.'
"The argument that people are making is, is it desperation or dedication," she said. "It's not necessarily volunteering at a homeless shelter, but it's contributing that might also bring you some benefits in the long run."
Americans Repaying Debt Most Since ‘52 Spurs Savings (Update1)
July 21 (Bloomberg) -- For the first time since Harry S. Truman was in the White House, Americans are paying back their debts, a phenomenon that just might help keep interest rates low as the Treasury sells a record $2 trillion of bonds and rising unemployment increases U.S. savings. While the proportion of consumers without jobs rose to 9.5 percent last month, household borrowing fell to 128 percent of the average family’s after-tax income in the first quarter from a record 133 percent a year earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The total debt of individuals, nonfinancial companies and federal, state and local governments grew at a 4.3 percent pace at the start of the year, down from a peak of 9.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimated. “We’ve never seen a pullback like this,” Goldman’s chief U.S. economist, Jan Hatzius, said in an interview from his New York office. “We are seeing an adjustment, and it’s very painful and there’s a lot of collateral damage.” The 0.7 percent contraction in debt among households and nonfinancial companies from January through March was the first since 1952, when Truman was president and the government began keeping the records, Hatzius said.
$1.1 Trillion More
“The levels of cash on bank balance sheets will keep government-bond yields lower,” Robert McAdie, global co-head of credit strategy Barclays Capital in London, said on a conference call with investors July 16.
The U.S. will sell $1.1 trillion of Treasuries by the end of the year, on top of the first half’s $963 billion, Barclays Plc estimates. While the Treasury steps up borrowing, corporations are rushing to lower indebtedness.
About 190 U.S. companies, including Dearborn, Michigan- based automaker Ford Motor Co. and Las Vegas casino owner MGM Mirage, raised a record $91 billion in secondary share sales from April through June, according to Bloomberg data. As of mid- June, proceeds from about three-quarters of these sales were used to pay back bonds and loans, the data show. Of the record $774 billion in corporate-bond offerings this year, about 75 percent were used to refinance existing borrowings, according to Bloomberg data and John Lonski, chief economist at Moody’s Capital Markets Group.
‘Debt Rehab’
Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s largest personal-computer maker, and Memphis, Tennessee-based International Paper Co., the biggest manufacturer of office paper and cardboard shipping boxes, both issued bonds in May to repay debt. “Corporate America is going through debt rehab,” said Lonski, who’s based in New York. “The focus right now is on improving financial health and that probably will be at the expense of capital spending and hiring activity. Nothing will discourage capital spending or encourage cutbacks in staff more than much lower-than-expected sales.” The job reductions are pushing unemployment near 10 percent, a level not seen in 26 years, according to the Labor Department.
No New Jeans
“You are not going to buy a new pair of jeans if you don’t have a job yet,” Blake Jorgensen, chief financial officer of Levi Strauss & Co., said in a phone interview from San Francisco. The jeans maker reported a second-quarter loss of $4.13 million on July 14, compared with a year-earlier profit of $701,000.
Retrenchment by consumers puts the U.S. economy on pace to grow at an annual average of “closer to 2 as opposed to 3 1/2 percent” for a generation or more, Bill Gross, co-chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, said in his July commentary posted on the firm’s Web site. “There has been a big change in the private sector, and that’s fine,” Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said today in semi- annual testimony before the House Financial Services Committee “It creates problems in the macro economy, because without consumer spending, the economy doesn’t grow as fast.” People “need to get their balance sheets in order and their budgets in order,” Bernanke said.
While U.S. savings rise, companies are enduring increasing levels of pain.
Avoiding Motorcycles
Consumers “understand what they are spending more than ever,” Mike Duke, chief executive officer of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., told employees and suppliers July 16 in Bentonville, Arkansas, where the world’s largest retailer is based. “This has brought on a new normal of how consumers view consuming, shopping.”
Frugal motorcycle shoppers are avoiding taking on debt to purchase bikes such as the Road King touring model, which costs as much as $40,000 when customized, from Harley-Davidson Inc.
The biggest U.S. motorcycle maker’s finance arm said July 16 that loans fell 33 percent in the second quarter to $700 million. “Sales of Harley-Davidson motorcycles at retail in the U.S. declined significantly in the second quarter, with the backdrop of unemployment at 25-year highs and consumer confidence at near-record lows,” the Milwaukee-based company’s CEO, Keith Wandell, who rides a Road King, said on a conference call.
‘Clear Tradeoff’
As Americans save more and borrow less, the U.S. will have to rely on “international growth to drive our growth,” Citigroup Inc. CEO Vikram Pandit said in prepared remarks for a June 15 speech in Detroit.
“There is a clear tradeoff between saving more and stimulating the economy in the short term to achieve stability,” Pandit said. “The world needs different drivers of growth away from the U.S. consumer and credit markets.”
‘Too Early’
It’s “too early” to tell whether the current plan is working and the country should be open to more spending, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, said July 7. Obama administration officials say it’s premature to discuss a second stimulus, since most of the initial measure’s effects won’t kick in until late this year and in 2010.
The U.S. lost a greater-than-expected 467,000 jobs last month, and Vice President Joe Biden said July 5 the administration “misread the economy” when it predicted unemployment would peak at 8 percent once the stimulus package was passed. On July 14, Obama said the jobless rate will “tick up” over the next several months.
‘Getting Started’
“If you look at various measures of debt in the system, they suggest what we’re doing is getting started on this adjustment; we still have several years to go,” Goldman’s Hatzius said. “We’re going to be at saving levels that are much, much higher than they were in 2006 and, in many cases, permanently.’
Slower U.S. growth may benefit the world economy by reducing trade imbalances and strengthening America’s financial position, said Jay Bryson, global economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC
The U.S. current-account deficit, which reached a record 6.3 percent of GDP in the third quarter of 2006, has shrunk to 4.5 percent as savings climbed. ‘‘It’s a good thing to raise our savings rate here in the U.S.,” Bryson said. “The large current account deficits in the U.S. are an accident waiting to happen. If we start to rebalance the world economy, the probability of future train wrecks starts to come down as well.”
‘Inopportune Time’
The de-leveraging of the U.S. economy comes at “an inopportune time,” said Martin Fridson, who joined with BNP Paribas Investment Partners to found Fridson Investment Advisors in New York last year. “It’s a change that’s got to occur, but it absolutely slows down the potential for recovery,” said Fridson. Consumers’ debt pullback is only now getting under way, said Simon Johnson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and former chief economist at the Washington-based IMF. The rise in savings so far is largely a product of mortgages being extinguished by home foreclosures, government tax cuts and transfer payments under the stimulus package, he said. “As there’s an adjustment to higher savings, then there is a potential paradox of thrift,” Johnson said, referring to economist John Maynard Keynes’s theory that increased saving is good for individuals but bad for society as a whole because it reduces demand. “To some extent, the government can offset that” with fiscal stimulus, he said. “At some point you have to worry about the budget deficit.” $15 Trillion Collapse The shortfall for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 totaled $1.1 trillion as of June 30, the first time the gap for this period surpassed $1 trillion, Treasury figures show.
After suffering a collapse in wealth of at least $15 trillion since early 2007, American consumers are leading the U.S. economy into a “new normal” of higher savings rates and lower consumption, according to Pimco’s Gross, who manages the world’s biggest bond fund. “‘Non Appetit,’ not Bon Appetit, will become the apt description for the American consumer and significant parts of the global economy, including the U.S.,” Gross wrote in the July commentary. Consumers are drinking more tap water, hurting demand for vegetable juices made by Camden, New Jersey-based Campbell Soup Co.,Sean Connolly, president of the U.S. division, told analysts July 15 at a soup factory in Maxton, North Carolina. “Unfortunately our vegetable-juice business has slowed this year along with the rest of the shelf-stable juice category due to the economic downturn,” he said.
“We definitely have a paradox of thrift going on,” said Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. in New York. “If everyone rushes for the exit at the same time, it’s hard to get out. If everyone is de- leveraging at the same time, it’s hard to get the economy going.”
Войти
Регистрация
Тема закрыта
Вот видите, Вы же даже не читали...
Наверх
