Both California and Oregon’s economies expanded at a 4.1% seasonally adjusted annual rate, leading the nation. Texas was next at 3.8%, suggesting much of the state’s economy had diversified enough to shrug off the collapse in oil prices.
The number of people hired in April fell to 5.1 million, down from 5.3 million in March and 5.5 million in February. That works out to a hiring rate of 3.5%, the slowest pace since August of 2014. While the hiring rate has improved since the worst periods of 2009 and 2010, employers have yet to return to hiring at the pace they did a decade ago.
Reviving the manufacturing sector won’t be easy—but, these advocates argue, it’s crucial. Manufacturing is one of the best generators of wealth for an economy, requiring processes, materials and work skills that create employment and profits at each step in an assembly. Countries that don’t make anything eventually start to lose their edge in research and product development.
The fate of BNSF Railway Co.’s new terminal near the Port of Los Angeles is now in jeopardy even though it has been in development for 10 years at a cost of more than $50 million and would provide badly needed rail capacity.
The trade gap increased 5.3% from March to a seasonally adjusted $37.44 billion, the Commerce Department said Friday. Exports of goods and services rose 1.5% while imports climbed 2.1%.
Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 38,000 in May, the weakest performance since September 2010, the Labor Department said Friday . . . Revisions showed employers added a combined 59,000 fewer jobs in April and March than previously estimated. Together, May’s weak job growth and the revisions bring the average monthly job gains in the past three months to 116,000, a sharp slowdown from the average 219,000 growth over the prior 12 months. . . The decline in the unemployment rate was driven by 458,000 people leaving the workforce. The labor-force participation rate fell to 62.6% in May, down 0.2 percentage point from April.
So far this year, half a dozen Republican-dominated state legislatures—including in Alabama, Arizona and North Carolina—have passed so-called pre-emption bills that ban Democratic-leaning cities from raising wages and mandating benefits such as sick leave above state or federal minimums. A half-dozen similar measures are pending in statehouses nationwide with more expected later this year.
Democrats have sweetened welfare and Medicaid benefits as well as grants for college students. And, of course, government workers have received fat raises. The state Legislative Analyst Office estimates that the prison guards’ new contract will cost the state $588 million in 2018. Mr. Brown’s budget includes an extra $734 million for home health-care workers (many represented by the SEIU). Pension costs have jumped by nearly three-quarters to $8.1 billion since 2011. The $15 an hour minimum wage that Mr. Brown recently signed will cost $3.4 billion when fully phased in for state workers.
Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 160,000 in April, the weakest gain since September, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate held steady at 5%, but the share of Americans participating in the labor force dipped after earlier signs of stabilization.
The housing market has recovered, but sluggish entry-level construction is putting a squeeze on families that would like to buy their first home. . . It’s a bigger issue at the entry level because builders face tighter margins to begin with. . . For example, consider the typical starter home in California’s Inland Empire, about an hour east of Los Angeles. The FHA loan limit there is $355,350. A typical home might require $70,000 in raw land cost, another $60,000 to develop the land, $100,000 in direct construction costs, and $63,850 in other overhead and selling costs. That brings the total cost to around $294,000. . . Ms. Zelman says impact fees in the Inland Empire now average around $50,000 per home, up from $11,000 in 2005. If this home is going to sell at the FHA limit, the profit—that is, the incentive to build this home—has essentially been washed out by the impact fee.
The Institute for Supply Management on Monday said its index of manufacturing activity fell to 50.8 in April from 51.8 in March. For a second straight month, however, the measure remained above 50, the threshold that divides expansion from contraction.
More people who were among the top 20% of income earners made money from digital platforms such as Uber and Airbnb than lower-income workers, according to new data from the JPMorgan Chase Institute.
In the first three months of this year, the rate was at 63.5%, not seasonally adjusted. That is down from 63.8% in the fourth quarter of 2015, according to estimates published on Thursday by the Commerce Department. That puts it back near its 48-year low of 63.4% in the second quarter of 2015.
Only 37% of American 12th-graders were academically prepared for college math and reading in 2015, a slight dip from two years earlier, according to test scores released Wednesday.
“Cities have long leaned on policies that address affordability head on. Vouchers, rent control and requirements for builders to supply affordable units are all tools that continue to be used. But planners and academics warn that such approaches have their limits. Housing-assistance programs often help the neediest, while leaving a large swath of the population shut out. And requirements that builders set aside affordable units or pay into a fund to build such units come with their own challenges, notably that growth in affordable housing comes to rely on a much larger increase in market-rate housing.”