Employers hired steadily in May, placing the U.S. on the one of the best four-month stretches of job creation since late 1990s and renewing optimism about the five-year-long recovery.
Nonfarm employment advanced a seasonally adjusted 217,000 last month, the Labor Department said Friday. April’s gain was revised down slightly, but the increase of 282,000 was the best in more than two years.
For people who moved from one county to another, moving because of a job-related reason rose with the distance of the move: 23 percent of moves less than 50 miles and 48 percent of those 500 miles or more. Moving for housing-related reasons showed change in the opposite direction, comprising 42 percent of shorter distance moves and 18 percent of longer distance ones.
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach maintained their ranking as the nation’s top gateway for international trade last year and container traffic through the twin ports is expected to rise 5.5 percent this year and 5.8 percent in 2015.
A seismic expansion joint on the westbound Carquinez Bridge – similar to a dozen used on the skyway portion of the new Bay Bridge eastern span – has cracked after less than 10 years of pounding by heavy trucks, Caltrans officials said Wednesday.
“In the last five months, we’ve seen 93 projects come through the Development Review Committee process,” Swearengin said. “Nineteen of them were fast-tracked and approved literally within a matter of hours or days within coming to City Hall.”
For the month of April, the state’s merchandise export trade totaled $14.09 billion, up 7.8% from the $13.07 billion in exports recorded in April 2013.
A notable exception to the “right place” trend is California. Criticized by some as a hostile, high-cost environment for business, California has shown a remarkable knack for coming out ahead in the race for large companies. The Golden State’s strength, it would seem, is reinvention: lowering its profile in manufacturing and financial services and strengthening its footprint in technology. No fewer than 31 of the 51 California companies on the Fortune 500 in 1995 are absent from the 2014 list. Three large defense contractors moved to other states: Lockheed Martin to Maryland, Rockwell Automation to Wisconsin, and Northrop Grumman to Virginia. California also lost a host of prominent corporate residents to mergers — among them, Pacific Telesis to AT&T (Texas), PacifiCare to UnitedHealth Group (Minnesota), and BankAmerica to the renamed Bank of America (North Carolina).
A Fed following the Taylor Rule would have raised rates by now, and it would not have exposed the nation to inflation risks by buying so many trillions of dollars of bonds and mortgage-backed securities over the past few years, several of the economists at the podium said. One paper presented at the conference, by University of Houston economist David Papell, found that the economy does better when the Fed sticks close to the Taylor Rule or something like it.
It’s fine to talk about government programs to help the poor, but wouldn’t it be better to alleviate the high living costs they face every day, and to create an economic climate that would give them more opportunities to climb the ladder through better jobs?
Consumer spending was down $8.1 billion, or 0.1%, last month, the Commerce Department said Friday.
While the Bay Area will continue to lead the state, and the drought will hurt the recovery in the Central Valley, the UOP quarterly forecast says job gains will ripple throughout the state. Soon, California will have recovered all of the jobs lost to the recession, “a year earlier than previously forecast,” the forecast says.
That’s according to the results of a new poll released today showing that 79 percent of residents believe the region is facing dire straits regarding home prices. And more than 7 of 10 people surveyed said the region’s traffic congestion is a catastrophe.
Workers can recover unpaid wages by placing liens on property owned by their employers, including businesses and homes where they performed work, under a bill that passed the Assembly on Wednesday.
The California Senate on Wednesday could not muster the votes to pass a measure that would have penalized high chief executive salaries with higher corporate taxes.
Legislators moved Thursday to further hike the state’s minimum wage and to guarantee workers three paid sick days a year, despite opposition from the California Chamber of Commerce, which labeled both proposals “job killers.”