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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (55185)	8/22/2006 11:54:27 AM
From: regli	Respond to of 116555

Excellent blog, Mish!

To: mishedlo who wrote (55185)	9/2/2006 1:50:31 AM
From: YanivBA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Bernanke feted as hero by struggling hometown By David Lawder Fri Sep 1, 3:28 PM ET DILLON, South Carolina (Reuters) - U.S. news.yahoo.com Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke received a hero's welcome on Friday from his hometown, a former tobacco and textiles center that has largely failed to benefit from the globalization and productivity improvements he has advocated. ADVERTISEMENT Dillon, a sleepy town of 6,800 just south of the North Carolina border, proclaimed Friday "Ben Bernanke Day" for the hometown boy who became the most powerful economic official in the world. Nearly 90 of his former classmates in the 1971 class of Dillon High School, along with state officials and hundreds of residents, attended ceremonies at the local courthouse to award him the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina's highest civic honor. Dillon itself has struggled economically in recent years with textile plant closings and the end of federal price supports for tobacco in the early 1990s. The county's unadjusted unemployment rate in June was 9.7 percent, more than twice the national average and well above the state average of 7.0 percent, according to Labor Department data. Dillon Mayor Todd Davis said many people in the town are scraping by on annual income of less than $20,000 a year. "We've got a lot of poor people in this area. Some families are on their second and third generation of welfare. They don't know anything else," Davis said. While other parts of the state have been successful in attracting new industries, such as the Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMWG.DE) plant in Spartanburg, the Dillon area has been less so. The only major new facility to locate in recent years is a distribution center for Harbor Freight Tools, a catalog retailer of tools -- many of which are imported -- employing about 250 people. The city is perhaps best known for its proximity to South of the Border, a tourist-trap collection of souvenir shops, fireworks stands, carnival rides and restaurants at the North Carolina border along a major interstate highway. For miles, billboards showing garish cartoon mascot "Pedro" pester motorists to stop. Bernanke, whose parents ran a local pharmacy, waited tables at the South of the Border's Sombrero Room restaurant during summers off from college -- a job he said taught him that Americans in small towns work hard to support their families and are hungry for economic improvement. "Now I am an economic policy maker, and I sit in a nice office in Washington, looking at reports and tables of data and following the fluctuations of the financial markets. However, I try not to forget what underlies all those data: millions of Americans working hard, trying to better themselves economically, struggling to manage their family finances, worrying about the price of gas and college tuition," Bernanke said in his acceptance speech. "I take my work extremely seriously because I know that, if my colleagues at the Federal Reserve and I do our jobs right, we will help our economy prosper and give more people the economic opportunities they seek." LIMITED PROSPECTS Virginia Johnson, a 48-year-old cashier at South of the Border, said she earns $5.25 an hour and has "a hard time making ends meet." She said there are few other job opportunities in the area for people with only a high school education like herself. Davis, who has been mayor for 3 years, said long-term disinvestment in local schools has left Dillon unable to produce a labor force with the basic skills needed by modern employers. The last school was built in 1971 -- the same year Bernanke graduated -- and the administration building is 110 years old. "When you get the (factory) site selectors come into town, they see the physical condition of the schools and it hurts us," Davis said. He estimates that it would cost $100 million to build a first class school system, a level of debt that the county's tax base could not support. 'BRILLIANT' STUDENT Former Dillon High classmates and teachers described Bernanke as a "brilliant" student who taught himself calculus because the school's curriculum ended at algebra. An 11-year-old Bernanke won the South Carolina state spelling bee in 1965, clinching victory with the word "perplexity," according to the Dillon Herald newspaper. He placed 26th in the national spelling bee that year, misspelling "edelweiss." Bernanke reminisced about his days playing saxophone in the Dillon High marching band but said "the bright lights of the big city" and Harvard University lured him away. He received a doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went on to teach at Princeton University and join the Fed. On Thursday, he said it was essential for local workers to acquire the skills necessary to adapt to ever-changing technology and economic competition. "If the recent gains in productivity growth are to be sustained, ensuring that we have a workforce that is comfortable with and adaptable to new technologies will be essential."