Tuesday, September 28, 2004
George W. Bush's Economy Woes Continue
The economy continues to Turn the Corner—into a dark alley.0 comments
The Conference Board's new Consumer Confidence Index just came out. This Index of 5,000 U.S. households covers the period through September 20, 2004.
Overall—when combined with a third straight monthly decline showing up in the numbers of the Conference Board's Leading Indicators Index, released earlier this month—these numbers do not bode well for Bush/Cheney '04.
Wall Street was not overly enthusiastic about the news, either. As the news was being released at 10am, the DJIA proceeded to drop some 40 points. It slowly recovered afterwards, and now by 12:45pm seems to be trending slightly higher again.
The Index highlights:
(The Index's base number is 100, which is where things stood in 1985 when the survey started. So everything is studied relative to that.)
In August, the overall Index stood at 98.7. It's now down to 96.8.
The Present Situation Index fell from 100.7 in August to 95.5 in September.
The Expectiations part of the survey remained flat.
In percentage terms, people saying jobs were "plentiful" dropped from from 18.4% to 16.8%.
Those saying jobs were “hard to get” soared from 26.0% in August to 28.3% in September.
It would be interesting to see the financial well being of the various segments of the sample in this survey, since people's anticipation of what lay ahead diverge dramatically, and at oddly even numbers, at the end points.
Consumers who anticipate there being "fewer jobs" increased from 15.1% to 16.1%.
At the same time, those who anticipate there being "more jobs" available rose from 16.3% to 17.7%.
It's hard to tell just from the core numbers whether this shows the despair/hope confusion of the American people overall, or whether there is a type of class warfare afoot here, with it all depending on your initial situation.
In tandem with these reports, however, there's this jobs tidbit from CBS MarketWatch:
Motorola to cut 1,000 jobs
By Jeffry Bartash, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 10:45 AM ET Sept. 28, 2004
WASHINGTON (CBS.MW)—Motorola plans to eliminate 1,000 jobs in connection with the spinoff of its semiconductor unit.
The move will result in a one-time cost of $50 million for severance benefits, Motorola said Tuesday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The layoffs will be spread across three different corporate segments.
Earlier this year, Motorola sold shares of its chip unit, now known as Freescale Semiconductor. The company still retains voting control over Freescale.
Motorola also said it will take a onetime charge of $80 million in the third quarter related to the early retirement of debt.
Separately, Motorola said it generated a one-time gain of $218 million from the sale of shares of Nextel Communications and Nextel Partners.
Shares of Motorola were down 19 cents at $17.31 in recent action. Nextel was up 32 cents to $23.25.
Jeffry Bartash is a reporter for CBS.MarketWatch.com in Washington.
(c) 1997-2004 MarketWatch, Inc. All rights reserved.
Drip, drip, drip.
posted by Gotham 1:11 PM
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