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To: Amy J who wrote (176984)	2/10/2004 10:34:23 AM
From: willcousa	Respond to of 186894

What is different about this cycle than the others? 9-11. The effect on our economy appears to have been tremendous. It has not received its' due in analysis. Will

To: Amy J who wrote (176984)	2/10/2004 11:33:05 AM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

I am only asking for disclosure AmyJ. There shouldn't be any objection in disclosure. BTW Steven Roach identifies offshoring of various "desk jobs" as the key reason the job market is broken. So now that we finally have economists hitting the mark, the issue is what to do about it. "let them eat cake" is not the right response imho. Message 19786095

To: Amy J who wrote (176984)	2/10/2004 12:49:25 PM
From: chomolungma	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

I think items #1 thru #5 are what's hugely impacting our job numbers: Confidence. Amy, there is one other possibility you should consider: The numbers are probably wrong. You really think that Canada is adding more jobs than the U.S.? Not likely. If you've followed the payroll data for as long as I have you realize that they are nothing but a crude guess as to what's taking place. They are subject to steep revisions - sometimes long after the fact. My personal take is that the productivity numbers are grossly overstated and the jobs numbers understated. If you assume for a moment that the government is missing some of the hours being worked because they are not picking up all the jobs with their surveys, then both numbers will become more reasonable. Just watch, 3,5 or 7 years from now, we'll recognize that the "jobless recovery" was nothing more than a catchy phrase.

To: Amy J who wrote (176984)	2/10/2004 1:10:50 PM
From: Robert O	Respond to of 186894

Amy, you purport to be running a start-up and eyeing yesterday and today you are at about 35 posts and we are only at lunch time for day two! lol Seriously, how and why in the world can you write so voluminously (many times links and research included) when you are supposed to be managing a business?? This is not meant to be a huge slam...I really am curious (incredulous). RO

To: Amy J who wrote (176984)	2/10/2004 2:31:42 PM
From: Buckwheat	Respond to of 186894

[Like Chambers said during his CC, CEOs are being unusually cautious in spending. You can extrapolate that to hiring too, which is a form of spending.] Nice to see that CEOs are finally regaining some sense of a realistic risk vs. rewards view. There has been a lot of wealth wasted in the past 5 years, but I guess in the long run, the lessons learned will justify the cash burned. [* Code Yellow alert during Dec & Jan hugely impacted CEO confidence * CEOs are extremely afraid of hiring right now (CIOs say they want to wait until Q1 is over and wait until Q1 numbers are reported before they increase budgets) * terrorism gives CEOs the jitters to hire * war gives CEOs the jitters to hire] The world is and always will be a dangerous place. We tend to pay more attention to mean people as opposed to the periodic surprises that mother nature deals us. A lot of companies have a significant portion of their eggs in baskets that are sitting on geological time bombs. I wonder sometimes if CEOs give this much thought when making a decision to locate or relocate production/jobs. And then there are some who choose to set all of their eggs on geological, meteorological, and political time bombs. And the sad thing is that our government will bail them out when the blast goes off. Buck

To: Amy J who wrote (176984)	2/10/2004 3:20:17 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

JOBLESS RECOVERY De Ja vu ! Why have we forgotten the jobless recovery of 91-92 ? We had a Bush in the White House ! We had won a stunning military victory ! But the economy was stuck in a jobless recovery, Until somehow Clinton message of "I feel your pain" , and a budget balancing somehow managed to get the mood up, and the economy grew at a rate to increase jobs. However I think that there is more to it than partisan politics. The 91-92 jobless recovery was due to the massive improvements in productivity caused by the impact of the PC on every desktop, and corporate downsizing in reducing the layers of management. The economy grew, but with fewer people. The end of the Cold War did not help either. The "Peace Dividend" meant that most people who worked for the defense industry ended up with pink slips. In that time frame Southern California was a disaster. A huge number of Middle Aged Professions were out of jobs, their jobs eliminated forever, and the Aerospace industry migrated wholesale out of Southern California into lower cost locales like Texas. Northern California got away lightly in that recession. "NAFTA was going to be huge sound of jobs being sucked out of USA into Mexico". However the Bush Jr recession was aggravated by the bursting of the Internet Bubble.However the Internet dramatically improved the productivity of the entire economy, and thus jobs everywhere are being squeezed out. Unfortunately India has now entered the world market as a source of cheap offshore white collar work. So the job situation is stagnant. It is ironic that when the dot com bubble burst in 2000-2001 about 70,000 H-1 Indian Software Developers lost their jobs in Silicon Valley alone, and returned to India. That huge Software pool returning to India should have been a blessing for US programmers. Not so. That pool became the nucleus for programming jobs in India, and a big chunk of Software Development is now being "exported to India". However Software Development has not been lost forever. Software has to be heavily customized and tweaked upon User Feedback. Since a big chunk of Software Market is still in USA, local programming expertise will always be needed. The need for new and more computer hardware is limited by Software. The PC is still not universal, since the Software has an "English bias". This excludes the huge populations of China and India.[ Even though English is spoken and understood widely in India, a big chunk of the 1 billion population is not comfortable dealing with English.] So Software will have to be customized to local needs. Micrososoft has a research centre in India to adapt the Software for the Major Indian Language, Hindi. I am sure that Software is also being developed to make it easier for Chinese to use computers as well. The Intelligent Cell Phone is here, but the software is rudimentary. More and more processing power will be available soon, but it is useless without new software. The Cheap and Plentiful Software talent in India can help in improving the software, and thereby expand the hardware market. I am sure that as the recovery picks up, steam, the "India effect" will be history, just as Mexico was in the early 90's.