KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Tuesday July 27 Housing and Economic stories

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TOP STORIES:

Illinois Construction Workers Make $50-68 Hour, Strike for 15% more - (Mish at globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com) Illinois construction workers live in fantasy land of business-as-usual. They are demanding 15% pay hikes when everyone of them ought to be fired with their jobs outsourced to the cheapest non-union shop. Please consider Construction Workers Go On Strike. Here in the Chicago area the highway construction workers went on strike....the reason they want a 5% raise each year over the next three year contract.....to cover the cost of increase healthcare cost! The current salary for construction workers is between $50.00 and $68.00 per hour which include benefits. Illinois is suffering from one of the worst recessions since the depression.... over 700,000 unemployed....Walmart has just announced they plan to build 24 new stores in the Chicagoland area.....most of the new jobs will pay $9.50 per hour....and there are conversations to raise this salary to $10.50 per hour....hundreds of unemployed workers have expressed willingness to take on these new jobs....with pleasure.....many people just want to work and get a paycheck.

Hedge Funds ‘Frozen in Headlights’ Cut Trading as Markets Swing - (www.bloomberg.com) Hedge-fund managers, Wall Street’s best compensated and supposedly smartest investors, are dazed and confused. Reeling from the worst second-quarter performance in a decade, hedge funds have scaled back trading as they struggle to figure out where markets are headed amid sometimes vicious crosscurrents in stock, commodities and other markets, according to brokers and managers. “There’s a degree of being frozen in the headlights, of not knowing what sectors to emphasize, of what securities to emphasize,” said Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer of Solaris Asset Management LLC, a Bedford Hills, New York-based firm with $2 billion in hedge funds and conventional stock funds. Hedge-fund managers, who oversee $1.67 trillion in assets, are reluctant to put money to work as they are buffeted by a wide range of often conflicting political and economic forces, from fiscal policy in Europe and the U.S., to what regulations will be imposed on the financial-services and energy industries, to the growth prospects in China. In turn, smaller and fewer trades may make it harder for funds to rebound from losses incurred since May, when the industry suffered its worst decline in 18 months.

Allstate CEO Says State Borrowing ‘Out of Control’ - (www.bloomberg.com) Allstate Corp. Chief Executive Officer Thomas Wilson said a surge in borrowing by U.S. state and local governments may trim the value of municipal debt holdings, and called for political leaders to cut costs. “Government borrowing is way out of control.” Wilson, 52, said yesterday in a Bloomberg Television interview from Aspen, Colorado. “We need to get our house in order.” Wilson said concerns about budget deficits and funding shortfalls will probably lead to market-value declines in the municipal bond market rather than widespread defaults. Allstate, the largest publicly traded U.S. home and auto insurer, cut its municipal-bond portfolio in three straight quarters through the end of March, reducing its holdings to $20.1 billion from $23.1 billion as of June 30, 2009. The insurer hasn’t released second- quarter results yet.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn Gave Raises Averaging 11.4% to 35 Staff Members - (www.myfoxchicago.com) Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has handed out raises -- some of more than 20 percent -- to his staff while proclaiming a message of "shared sacrifice" and planning spending cuts of $1.4 billion because the state is awash in debt. The Democrat has given 43 salary increases averaging 11.4 percent to 35 staffers in the past 15 months, according to an Associated Press analysis of records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. They include a $24,000-a-year bump for the man promoted to shepherd the state through the fiscal storm. Budget Director David Vaught got a 20 percent raise to bring his pay to $144,000 in October when he moved to his new position from Quinn's staff, where he was a senior adviser. Lawmakers, whom Quinn has asked to raise income taxes and borrow billions to meet its obligations for employee pensions reacted with skepticism and anger. "It's insulting," said Rep. Jack Franks, a Woodstock Democrat who voted "no" on Quinn's proposal to borrow $3.7 billion for the pension payment that the House OK'd but Senate has not. "It shows how out of touch he is with the real world, where businesses are freezing salaries and in some cases laying people off," Franks said.

US shopping center vacancy rates rose in 2nd quarter - (www.reuters.com) Retailers shuttered more stores in U.S. shopping centers during the second quarter, further delaying a rebound in the struggling retail real estate market, according to research firm Reis Inc. Shopping centers and strip malls have been pounded harder than other types of real estate, hurt by weak consumer spending, anemic job growth and an oversupply built to serve new housing that never materialized. "Until we see stabilization and recovery take root in both consumer spending and business spending and employment, we do not foresee a recovery in the retail sector until late 2012 at the earliest," said Victor Calanog, Reis director of research. For U.S. strip centers, the vacancy rate in the second quarter rose 0.10 percentage point from the first quarter to 10.9 percent, slightly below the 11 percent in 1991 during the prior real estate bust, according to the Reis quarterly report, released on Wednesday. Retailers gave up 1.85 million square feet of occupied space in the second quarter at neighborhood shopping centers, while developers opened less than 400,000 square feet of new strip mall space. That compares with an average of about 7 million to 8 million square feet of shopping centers built each year from about 2001, according to Reis.