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A Tale of Two Employment Surveys - (finance.yahoo.com) The economy added 120,000 jobs in March, half of February's gain of 240,000 and the fewest in five months. Yet the unemployment rate fell for the first time since January. How did the rate fall despite such a small job gain? Because the government does one survey to learn how many jobs were created and another survey to determine the unemployment rate. Those surveys can produce results that sometimes seem to conflict. One is called the payroll survey. It asks mostly large companies and government agencies how many people they employed during the month. This survey produces the number of jobs gained or lost. In March, the payroll survey showed that companies added 121,000 jobs, and federal, state and local governments cut 1,000. The other is the household survey. Government workers ask whether the adults in a household have a job. Those who don't are asked whether they're looking for one. If they are, they're considered unemployed. If they aren't, they're not considered in the work force and aren't counted as unemployed. The household survey produces each month's unemployment rate. In March, the household survey showed that the number of people who say they have a job fell by 31,000, but the number of people looking for a job fell by even more — 164,000. That lowered the unemployment rate slightly, from 8.3 percent to 8.2 percent.
Governments have made the recovery worse - (www.telegraph.co.uk) Bad and uncoordinated policies have "made the recovery worse than it otherwise would have been", Mr Dimon wrote in his annual letter to shareholders. "You cannot prove this in real time, but when economists 20 years from now write a book on the recovery, it may well be entitled 'It could have been much better'." New regulations, he said, have slowed bank lending at "precisely the wrong time". JPMorgan weathered the financial crisis better than most of its rivals and Mr Dimon, known for his combativeness, has become something of a spokesman for Wall Street since. Although the 56 year-old insisted that he agreed with the intention of much of the regulation, the letter added that the "result of the financial reform has not been intelligent design". JPMorgan will spend about $3bn (£1.9bn) over the next few years to ensure that it is compliant with new regulations.
China doomsayer sees crash coming - (www.marketwatch.com) China’s consumption boom is drawing to a close, according to one economist’s contrarian view, which calls for no growth — or even a contraction — in the Chinese economy and the advent of an era of deflation and weaker spending. Investments leveraged to the rise of the Chinese consumer, ranging from Australian miners to luxury-handbag makers and even iPhones are due for a reality check, according to Jim Walker, founder and managing director of the Hong Kong-based economic research company Asianomics. While much of the analyst community has touted China’s growing domestic demand in recent years, Walker sees the Chinese consumer as unlikely to show much resilience, now that the economy is on a weakening trend and easy credit has run its course. “The contrarian call we have is to short or underweight consumer plays until we get through this,” said Walker.
Fifth TARP Bank Fails, Likely Wiping Out Taxpayer Stake - (online.wsj.com) Sonoma Valley Bank in northern California failed on Friday, the fifth financial institution that failed despite having received federal bailout funds. The failure likely wipes out the $8.7 million taxpayer investment that was made in the bank in early 2009 as part of the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program. Several hundred banks that received funding under TARP, a program approved by Congress in 2008 to help financial institutions and other companies in the wake of the global financial crisis, have either paid back the money or are expected to within several years. But there is a growing group of banks that continued to struggle after getting bailouts, or have already been seized by regulators. Officials who designed the program had said the money was intended to go to companies that weren’t at risk of toppling, and regulators have sought to downplay the failures of TARP-connected banks.
Where Housing Once Boomed, Recovery Lags - (www.nytimes.com) Half a decade has passed since crowds of lunchtime workers regularly packed the Fish Market restaurant, a popular fixture of this southern Maryland crossroads known by the lighthouse on its roof. Sales representatives for drug companies no longer buy hundreds of dollars in food for workers in the medical offices across the street. The private dining room, once a popular spot for business meetings and family parties, was closed in the fall. The official statistics say that the national economy has been growing for almost three years, and that Maryland is growing faster than most states. But in Prince George’s County, where housing prices have fallen more than anywhere else in the state, there is scant evidence of renewed prosperity.
Multi-generation households are on the rise - (money.cnn.com) As the economy continues to take a toll on consumers' finances, a growing number of people are discovering that becoming roommates with mom and dad, or a 20- or 30-something son or daughter, helps to ease some of the financial pain in tough times. As of 2010, 4.4 million U.S. homes held three generations or more under one roof, a 15% increase from 3.8 million households two years earlier, according to the latest data available from the Census Bureau. When Alicia Moura's father-in-law, Aecio D'Silva, retired from teaching at the University of Arizona in 2010 to pursue private-sector projects in aqua-culture and bio-fuel, he didn't expect to wait long before his efforts paid off. But then the economy tanked, development funds dried up and his ventures languished. Soon afterward, Alicia started experiencing some medical issues with her pregnancy and the family decided it would be best to move in together. Now everyone -- Alicia, her husband, their two young daughters and the in-laws -- live under one roof.
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