Financial & Business News
GregD -- Tuesday, August 21, 2007 -- 05:33:12 PMCurrent financial & business news.
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Food prices could rocket as US harvest continues to wilt in blistering heat
True, but it's a drag for farmers. This was supposed to be a bumper crop year.
I don't know about "rocket" - typical food price inflation's around 2-2.5%/yr, and they're talking 2.5-3% if the corn/soybeans don't do well this year.
Local (central IN) ag reporting is saying that without significantly more rain by early August there'll be losses. The long-term forecast is lower than average rainfall though, so optimism is low. Soybeans are apparently more flexible and can go longer waiting for rain before production. Farmers interviewed say what they'd like is for 4-6" from tropical storms to sweep through the midwest from the gulf as has happened in previous summers but, again, tropical storm activity is low at this point.
All I know is my lawn & veggie garden are both toasted brown. I couldn't keep up at all. But on the economic upside, I'll probably be pouring $ into landscaping next year.
In June, more workers left employment to join SS disability program than found new jobs
More workers joined the federal government's disability program in June than got new jobs, according to two new government reports, a clear indicator of how bleak the nation's jobs picture is after three full years of economic recovery.
The economy created just 80,000 jobs in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. But that same month, 85,000 workers left the workforce entirely to enroll in the Social Security Disability Insurance program, according to the Social Security Administration.
The disability ranks have outpaced job growth throughout President Obama's economic recovery. While the economy has created 2.6 million jobs since June 2009, fully 3.1 million workers signed up for disability benefits.
In other words, the number of new disability enrollees has climbed 19% faster than the number of new jobs created during the sluggish recovery. (Even after accounting for people who left the disability program because they died or aged into retirement, the disability ranks have climbed more than 1.1 million in the past three years.)
I read somewhere recently that the average family farmer is wealthier and makes a higher income than the average American.
In my anecdotal experience, that's totally true. The amount of subsidies farmers' receive is truly staggering. Smaller family farms almost don't exist; it's big business, with family entities acquiring thousands and thousands of acres and getting (literally) hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidies.
I'm excluding big business from my comment. Agribusiness is, of course, a totally different beast. The people running those huge concerns aren't farmers.
Saw a lot of dried-out fields of corn yesterday in So IN while driving back from a bike ride yesterday, many of them mowed down with the occasional strip left for insurance inspection. So the IN corn's taking a hit. It happens, it's why they're insured.
Blitz is facing 42 lawsuits -- most brought by the same three lawyers. Consumers have accused the company of making faulty cans that explode when used to pour gasoline onto fires.
I can't imagine it's possible to make a gas can where that is not a significant danger. I'd love to see more cases where guys bringing torts like this are forced to pay a company's legal & insurance costs for bringing a damned fool suit.
DC/MD Power company wants to raise rates to cover legal costs for arguing for rate increases, and would further like to not be punished at all for the rank, obvious failures in properly maintaining lines and service to customers that were found while investigating the issue.
But here’s the new outrage: In its current case before the state commission, requesting a $66 million rate increase, Pepco is arguing that it should not be penalized a dime for its past shortcomings — even though its public-relations message has been that it’s learned from previous mistakes.Moreover, in a move that ought to win it an award for chutzpah, Pepco is justifying $2.5 million of the new rate request to cover its costs for outside lawyers and consultants in the case decided against it in December.
In other words, Pepco wants the same customers who have been suffering the effects of its inadequate upkeep to pick up the tab for experts who argued — unsuccessfully, thank heaven — that its reliability was fine all along.
Hah. State utility regulators are not inclined to agree with Pepco. Thank God.
Dude, Pepco is DC and its Maryland environs. NoVa is under the dominion of Dominion, which is not perfect but nowhere near as bad and unreliable as Pepco. We lost power last week, for example, but not during the December 2009 and February 2010 snowstorms.
Why has Amazon accepted collecting state sales taxes? Because it's about to seriously damage physical retailers by providing next/same-day delivery in urban/suburban centers nationwide. Physical retailers demanding equal treatment on sales tax for Amazon may have wakened the beast.
If you click buy on something in the morning and it's at your home in the afternoon, long as there's no real difference in price you may never go to a store to buy non-perishable items again. The second you buy your shopping cart, automated robots will pick & gather everything and Amazon's own local delivery system will get it to your house that day.
I have Prime and as the author notes, properly-timed orders of many regular items typically arrive on the next day already so the system they're developing is definitely working. They're simply developing the most efficient retail distribution chain ever.