US Corporations are hiring – they are just not hiring you!
The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, says Robert Scott, the institute’s senior international economist. “There’s a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy,” says Scott.
American jobs have been moving overseas for more than two decades. In recent years, though, those jobs have become more sophisticated — think semiconductors and software, not toys and clothes. And now many of the products being made overseas aren’t coming back to the United States. Demand has grown dramatically this year in emerging markets like India, China and Brazil. Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent often points out that a billion consumers will enter the middle class during the coming decade, mostly in Africa, China and India. He is aggressively targeting those markets. Of Coke’s 93,000 global employees, less than 13 percent were in the U.S. in 2009, down from 19 percent five years ago. (see my interview with Kent here).
We’re anticipating the usual 400,000 jobs lost for the week at 8:30 this morning and I sure didn’t see too many “Help Wanted” signs at the malls this year, or anywhere else now that I think about it. We also have the Chicago PMI at 9:45, Pending Home Sales at 10:00, Natural Gas Inventories at 10:30 followed by both Oil Inventories at 11 along with the Kansas City Fed’s Manufacturing Index. Later today (3pm) we get the very inflationary USDA Agriculture Prices where we can short FCOJ like this as the panic that drove prices up this week seems a bit overdone.
Of course, I’ve been saying the entire commodity rally is overdone as I don’t see how firing 1.4M Americans who made $35,000 and replacing them with 1.4M Chinese workers who make $2,500 means the price of oil should go up. Only the fact that the US Government is going deeper and deeper into debt to help those 1.4M laid off Americans buy their next tank of gas is keeping demand level – without that support, buses would be MUCH more popular in the US, as they already are in China…
