Brother Can You Spare A Dime: Open Jobs Plummet

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2/13/2010

Unemployment may have dropped below 10% last month, but the number only looks good in a vacuum. The Bureau of Labor Statistics , the bearer of much of the federal government’s bad news over the last two years, said that the number of jobs open in America dropped to 2.5 million in December. That was a sharp decline from 3.2 million in the same month of 2008. The BLS reported that “Over the 12 months ending in December, hires totaled 49.4 million and separations totaled 53.6 million, yielding a net employment loss of 4.2 million.”

 
China overtook Germany last year to become world export champion, official figures confirmed on Tuesday. December trade figures for Germany highlighted the hit Europe’s largest economy took in 2009 from the collapse in global economic confidence at the start of the year. German goods’ exports fell by 18.4 per cent compared with the previous year – the biggest year-on-year fall since 1950, according to the federal statistics office.
 
The outlook of small business owners remained bleak at the start of the new year, according to a survey released on Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business. "Small business owners entered 2010 the same way they left 2009 -- depressed," the group said, noting its Small Business Optimism Index reading for January was still below the 90 mark, the dividing line between positive and negative outlooks.
 
None other than the Chicago Federal Reserve has taken up the cause of admonishing about the broad and systematic danger that HFT (high frequency trading) presents to market topology. In a paper titled "Controlling risk in a lightning-speed trading environment" in which the Chicago Fed says that regulators should examine the risks of HFT which has the potential to amplify systemic risk and errors.

 
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