Hawaii’s initial unemployment claims were down 1.2 percent last week.
The Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism released a report Thursday showing that a total of 2,466 first-time unemployment claims were filed statewide in the past week, compared to 2,497 claims during the same week in 2009.
Oahu, the Big Island and Maui all saw decreases in new claims filed, while Kauai had a significant increase in the number of first-time claims.
Kauai’s 231 new claims was an increase of 90, or 63 saving account payday loan.8 percent, compared to the 141 claims it recorded during the same week last year, according to DBEDT data.
Oahu showed 1,383 new claims last week, a decrease of 2.7 percent from last year. The Big Island recorded 430 first-time unemployment claims, down 12.1 percent, and Maui had 347 new claims, down 7.2 percent from the 374 first-time claims during this week last year.
A online cash advance is a service provided by most credit card and charge card issuers.
Pittsburgh got a nod from Forbes, landing the No. 4 spot on its list of best cities for working moms.
Forbes Woman rated the 50-largest U.S. cities in terms of how friendly they are to working moms, using a combination of factors: women’s income, cost of living, pediatricians, unemployment, violent crimes and spending per pupil No teletrack payday loans. Minneapolis-St. Paul topped the list, followed by Washington, D.C., and Boston. Las Vegas ranked last.
The Forbes Woman list is available here.
Payday loans no faxing fall on the less risky side simply because the money loaned to you is a percentage of your next paycheck.
A Sacramento County Superior Court judge denied the governor’s request to order State Controller John Chiang to pay many state employees the federal minimum wage, the latest in a two-year standoff.
Judge Patrick Marlette’s decision is the latest battle between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chiang, whose office issues paychecks to 240,000-plus state workers.
About 200,000 faced earning $7.25 per hour — or $290 per week — since their bargaining units had not reached a deal with the governor last month.
The governor took the action in order to preserve cash as he and state lawmakers attempt to address a $19.1 billion shortfall for this current fiscal year. The cash-strapped state is looking at aggressive cost-cutting efforts to control spending, including possibly curbing payroll and programs statewide.
Friday furloughs ended last month, but the governor soon announced the federal minimum wage proposal in order to preserve cash.
But Chiang, a Democrat, said he would not follow the governor’s order unless the court demanded no fax pay day loan. The state 3rd District Court of Appeal found in favor of Schwarzenegger’s order, but Marlette’s ruling Friday delays the issue until July 26, with a full hearing next month.
So, state employees will likely receive their full paychecks, since checks are processed starting July 22.
State employees, many of whom lost about 15 percent of their pay with the three-day-per-month furloughs, would have been paid the federal minimum wage until a budget was passed, and then receive retroactive pay for the remainder of their salary.
Chiang has argued that the state’s computer system could not handle the minimum-wage request, and dramatically lowering pay for state employees could create legal problems for California.
The High Point City Council has voted to approve an incentive package for a startup drug company that is considering locating there.
The incentives for Apixir Pharma Sciences would be worth up to $35,000, if the firm does open a facility and meets certain milestones. Officials with the High Point Economic Development Corp. said Apixir plans to create at least 25 local jobs within three years, mostly in scientific and research positions. The average wage would be between $40,000 and $50,000 per year.
The company is considering a location at Premier Office & Technology Park, but is also considering other locations in the Triad and elsewhere, officials said.
This ought to keep the Maytag repairman busy for a while.
The appliance manufacturer along with the Consumer Product Safety Commission on Thursday announced the recall of about 1.7 million dishwashers made by the company between February 2006 and April of 2010.
"An electrical failure in the dishwasher’s heating element can pose a serious fire hazard," said the recall notice issued by the CPSC.
"Maytag has received 12 reports of dishwasher heating element fires that have resulted in fires and dishwasher damage, including one report of extensive kitchen damage from a fire," the CPSC said. There have no reports of injuries.
The recall includes select Maytag, Amana, Jenn-Air, Admiral, Magic Chef, Performa and Crosley brands manufactured by Maytag.
The company has set up a website where customers can check their unit’s serial number to see if it is included in the recall — www.repair.maytag.com. Consumers will be able to choose between having their dishwasher repaired or accepting a rebate toward the purchase of a new dishwasher.
The Maytag repairman has been a staple of the company’s corporate image. Since 1967, Maytag has touted its quality by showing a bored repairman with nothing to do.
Leafing through newspapers and magazines, I ran into these mutual fund ads.
From Janus: "100 percent of Janus equity funds have beaten their benchmarks since inception."
From T. Rowe Price: "Proven performance that has stood the test of time. For each 3-, 5- and 10-year period ended Dec. 31, 2009, over 75 percent of our funds beat their Lipper average." (That refers to the average performance of funds tracked by Lipper, a fund analysis firm.)
From Fidelity Investments: "In each of the past one-, five- and 10-year periods, at least 8 of the 10 Fidelity Select Portfolios broad-market sector funds beat their benchmark indexes." (This one refers to 10 Fidelity "Select" funds. Each invests in specific sectors of the economy.)
For many fund companies, performance sells (although some major firms, such as Vanguard, advertise low costs rather than performance, and others, such as Dodge and Cox, do not advertise at all). And when the fund’s "absolute," or actual return isn’t all that great, then "relative" performance, or how a fund did compared to others, is the thing to tout when you can.
For example, the Fidelity Select Technology fund did beat the so-called MSCI technology sector index for the 10 years ended March 31. But with technology stocks in the tank, the fund lost an average of 7.15 percent a year. It’s just that the index lost more, or 8 percent.
We need to read ads critically, including the tiny-print disclaimers in the footnotes. We also need to question how significant performance numbers are.
As the ads all say to comply with Securities and Exchange Commission rules, "past performance cannot guarantee future results." But even so, isn’t past performance a factor to consider?
Debate has been raging on that front for years, with a recent academic study suggesting fund performance advertisements are misleading investors payday advance low fees.
"A large body of studies has found little evidence that high past returns predict high future returns. In fact, advertised mutual funds even tend to underperform the market after being advertised," said Ahmed Taha, a professor at Wake Forest University School of Law and co-author of the study.
"We found that people viewing the advertisement with the current SEC disclaimer were just as likely to invest in a fund, and had the same expectations regarding a fund’s future returns" as people shown the ads without the disclaimer, said Alan Palmiter, another co-author and law professor at Wake Forest.
The study, also co-authored by Molly Mercer, an accounting professor at Arizona State University, suggests investors would be more likely to heed a more strongly worded disclaimer such as: "Do not expect the fund’s quoted past performance to continue in the future. Studies show that mutual funds that have outperformed their peers in the past generally do not outperform them in the future."
On the other hand, I can cite evidence that sectors in the market that have done well recently — and therefore, the funds that invest in them — continue to do well for a while.
That is, in fact, the basis of the "upgrading" strategy of moving incrementally into funds with superior near-term performance — a strategy that has led to strong absolute and relative long-term returns for DAL Investment Company of San Francisco, which publishes the NoLoadFundX newsletter and manages the FundX Upgrader mutual funds. (Disclaimer: I invest in some of these funds.) Overall, I consider many factors when choosing a fund, including performance in up and down markets, costs, manager tenure and sticking to a well-defined discipline.
Visitor spending in Hawaii increased a modest 0.5 percent year over year to $760.2 million in April, marking two straight months of growth, according to preliminary data released Thursday by the Hawaii Tourism Authority.
Visitors from the U.S. West, Hawaii’s biggest market, spent $296.8 million in April, a 5.6 percent increase from the year before.
The biggest percentage increase in visitor spending came from Canadians, who spent 24.5 percent more in April, totaling $60.2 million.
The slight boost in visitor spending came courtesy of a 1.1 percent increase in visitor arrivals by air — to 536,194.
Hawaii saw a boost in visitors from the U.S. West and Canada, with increases of 5.8 percent and 2 percent, respectively. But visitor arrivals from both the U.S. East and Japan were down for the month, by 4.7 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively.
The statistics measure spending by visitors who arrive by air and do not factor in spending from cruise ship passengers.
Overall visitor arrivals by air and cruise ship (which brought in 15,865 visitors in April) increased by 1.9 percent to a total of 552,059 visitors year over year.
Among the major Hawaiian islands, Maui continued to see the biggest increase in visitor arrivals, up 3 percent to 161,140 in April. It is the only island to see continuous growth in visitor arrivals since the start of the year.
Maui also saw an 8.9 percent increase in visitor spending in April, which totaled $202.1 million.
Year-over-year results from Hawaii’s top visitor markets for April:
• 5.8 percent increase in arrivals by air (245,203 visitors) from the U.S. West;
• 4.7 percent decline in arrivals by air (119,768 visitors) from the U.S. East;
• 1.4 percent decline in arrivals (83,230 visitors) from Japan;
• 2 percent increase in arrivals (33,259 visitors) from Canada.
BERLIN — A dark cloud has settled over the world’s financial markets, as growing numbers of people conclude that the debt crisis in Europe could hammer global growth — and even bring back recession barely a year after a patchy recovery took hold.
Government officials — whose job it is to boost confidence — downplay that risk, but many economists are warning that a much-feared "double dip" recession could be starting from Europe.
It would be the next ugly chapter in the global financial and economic turmoil that began three years ago. And now as then, what is striking is the inter-connectedness of everything — how near-default in Greece and weeks of dithering in Germany have affected commodities such as oil and gold and, with demand and confidence waning, have bludgeoned stock markets around the world in a way that rattles ordinary people saving for retirement from Korea to California.
In 2007, the bad debt connected to repackaged subprime mortgages started undermining banks and hedge funds, and by early 2008 confidence in the system was slipping fast. This time it is the exposure of banks everywhere to sovereign debt — the IOUs of governments — whose value has been falling for months.
The sheer size of the European economy is a factor, said Mauro F. Guillen, director of the Lauder Institute at The Wharton School in Pennsylvania. "If European demand goes down, global growth will slow down," he said.
"A European economy that lags is not necessarily enough to put the world economy back into recession," Nicholas Colas, ConvergEx Group chief market strategist, said. "But a European economy that cannot stabilize its currency and capital markets certainly will push the global economy back into the red.
"A double dip is a possibility."
It is a daunting prospect, because having already deployed their best countermeasures — stimulus spending and central bank interest rate cuts — governments everywhere may be out of ammunition.
Stephen Lewis, a London-based economist with Monument Securities, spoke for many of the pessimists Friday after a week of market turmoil in Europe when he saw "no guarantee that the upswing in the global economy from 2009’s low point will be sustained."
At the heart of the crisis are fears that indebted eurozone governments will be unable to pay what they owe. Those fears have sent the prices of government bonds — many of them held by big banks in Germany and France — plummeting. Europe also faces low growth prospects because governments must cut back on spending to pay down heavy debt loads payday loan lenders in states.
If banks in Europe and beyond suffer losses on marked-down government bonds, this would then make them afraid to lend the money that businesses need to operate and expand, choking off growth — a replay, in a sense, of the freezing of credit markets after the Sept. 2008 collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, which led to a worldwide recession. The global economy shrank by 0.6 percent in 2009, its first dip since World War II.
"If sovereign debt concerns are accompanied by worries over bank liquidity any more significant than those currently influencing the credit market, another dip in world economic activity would seem a sure thing," Lewis said.
As fear spreads, stocks and the price of oil, both signs of expectations for future economic growth, have been drawn into the downdraft. And gold, traditionally a safe haven, has hit ominous all-time highs.
Most of the world’s leading stock markets are below where they started the year as investors revise down their growth expectations for the global economy.
Reflecting the optimism that held sway until recently, the IMF slightly raised in April its 2010 global growth forecast to 4.2 percent, although eurozone growth was forecast at only 1 percent. Now even that looks optimistic.
World markets have always affected each other, but instant and constant connectivity and real-time trading and instant information have taken things to a new level; bad news in Milan can trigger instant selloffs in Tokyo or Chicago.
A sell-off in the stock market this week signaled, among other things, a belief that the economy is headed for a slowdown later this year, after having expanded by nearly 12 percent in the first quarter from the same quarter the year before.
Daniel Tarullo, a governor with the U.S. Federal reserve, said the direct effect on U.S. banks of losses on exposure to overextended governments in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy "would be small." But if problems were to spread more broadly through Europe, U.S. banks would face larger losses as the value of traded assets dropped and loan delinquencies mounted.
Neil Mackinnon, global macro strategist at VTB Capital in London, said it would be a mistake to think the problems on Europe’s periphery represented only a local crisis.
"The problems in the eurozone debt markets, which many people thought was a regional problem, has morphed into a major global problem," Mackinnon said.
The Peach State remains among the best states in which to business, but it is dropping.
Chief Executive magazine on Thursday ranked Georgia the seventh-best state for business, down from No. 4 in 2009.
To get its annual rankings, the magazine surveyed more than 660 CEOs to rate states based on a range of criteria that included taxation, regulation, workforce quality, education and living quality. Click here to see the complete list of each state ranked by each category.
Chief Executive magazine’s top 10 states for business, in order, are Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Nevada, Florida, Georgia, Colorado, Utah and South Carolina.
Dr. David Poplack has been awarded a $953,000 grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Initiative of Texas to expand the Passport for Care program for pediatric cancer survivors.
Poplack, professor of pediatric oncology at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Texas Children’s Cancer Center, helped develop the web-based program designed to guide health care for pediatric cancer survivors.
He will use the grant to expand the program to 12 treatment centers in Texas, including in Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, the Rio Grande Valley and north Texas.
Launched in October 2008, more than 1,000 patients have been enrolled in the program, which is currently used at Texas Children’s Hospital’s Cancer Center.
The CPRIT grant also includes a research component. A series of studies will be conducted to examine the current standard of care and follow-up information survivors are getting, and how the implementation of Passport for Care will improve that low fee pay day loans.
More than 75 percent of pediatric cancer patients are cured; however many have late effects of their treatment than can be serious or even life-threatening.
“Passport for Care provides the physician with a detailed summary of the survivor's treatment and individualized guidelines for their follow-up screening. It essentially makes every physician a survivor expert,” Poplack said in a statement.
Passport for Care was also developed by Dr. Marc Horowitz, professor of pediatrics hematology-oncology at Baylor College of Medicine, and Dr. Michael Fordis, director of BCM's Center for Collaborative and Interactive Technologies.
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