News

Dean Schefrin bought a home at just the right time. He and his then-fiancee purchased their four-bedroom Thousand Oaks home last August, catching the rising wave of Southern California home prices.

Just a few years ago, California was hemorrhaging tens of thousands of jobs and had one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.

SACRAMENTO — California voters would be asked to decide the fate of the state’s controversial enterprise zones in November 2014 under a proposal Friday by the head of the state Democratic Party.

California’s unemployment rate tumbled to 8.6% in May from 9% in April, falling to its lowest level since November 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

Michigan has given large tax breaks and subsidies to employers more often than any other state, according to a new report that tallies up state and local “megadeals,” or incentive packages worth more than $75 million.

“Waiter and Waitress Nation” is the title of a recent posting by American Enterprise Institute economist James Pethokoukis. Of the 175,000 net payroll jobs added nationwide in May 2013, more than half were created by three sectors associated with lower wage jobs, the restaurant sector (38,100 jobs), retail trade (27,700) and temporary employment (25,600 jobs)

A new front is opening in the education wars as a report released Tuesday derides California’s teacher training schools as among the worst in a nation full of substandard programs.

California’s lawmakers agreed last week on a state budget that tackled issues like school funding and Medi-Cal, but had little in it for business.

As data dragnets and information breaches dominate the news, states are scrambling to cash in on a rapidly expanding business sector by offering tax incentives to firms that protect sensitive information from outside attacks.

SACRAMENTO — Let’s say you were buried under an avalanche of debt for years and could only make the minimum payments on your credit card bills. But then you started cutting back your expenses — and even got a raise at work. Suddenly, you were paying your bills on time, and even going out to eat a couple of times a month.

The tectonic plates of the world economy are shifting, moving the yield on the 10-year Treasury to the highest level in more than a year and shaking financial markets from Tokyo to Mumbai and Johannesburg to São Paulo.

States this year awarded tax breaks to businesses, touted worker-training programs and even poached jobs from each other to boost their economies and create work for the nearly 12 million Americans still unemployed.

OSTERATH’S 12,000 citizens are angry. Their quiet backwater in the Ruhr, close to Düsseldorf, is the proposed site for the biggest converter station in Europe. This vast installation will transform high-voltage direct current to alternating current.

Construction creates jobs. But it’s tough to get large infrastructure projects going when they’re blocked by overly stringent environmental laws and state regulations that slow and sometimes halt the process.

For the last two years, media companies have been combating a series of lawsuits brought by interns claiming the right to a paycheck under state and federal law. Things began looking good for team management this past May, after a federal court scuttled the class action filed by a former Harper’s Bazaar intern against Hearst Magazines.