Yields on the 10-year Treasury note and 30-year bond hit their lowest points in 50 years on Thursday. Oil prices fell for the sixth month in a row. AT&T announced that 12,000 people, 4% of its workforce, have no more jobs, just in time for Christmas. The number of people in the US receiving unemployment benefits hit a 25-year high.
Retail sales, except Costco (up 5% year over year) crashed and burned in November. A share of Ford stock won’t buy three songs on ITunes and GM’s stock, per share, will just get you just over four songs. US AutoMakers’ CEO’s were back panhandling Congress, one making a reported $50 million per year, this for losing Billions, over and over again, all now willing to work for $1 per year if Congress will let loose those $34 or 35 Billion they now want. Chrysler and GM said they might not make it long enough to sing Auld Lang Syne this New Year’s Eve if they don’t get those Billions right now.
Harvard, in business in Cambridge, Mass. since the early 1600’s, announced that it’s $36.9 billion university endowment fund lost 22 percent of its value in the last four months and could decline as much as 30 percent by the end of the fiscal year on June 30. Fortress Investment Group, a giant in the hedge fund world, is possibly on its last legs; it’s shares would not buy a newsstand magazine at current prices, although its founders, when it went public in February 2007, were instant Billionaires, at least on paper.
The European Central Bank lowered its benchmark interest rate by three-quarters of a percentage point, to 2.5 percent, the largest in the bank’s 10-year history. 2008 has seen the Bank cut its key rate by nearly half to provide credit lifelines to sick and dying European banks. A thousand people in the world of media at Viacom and NBC have lost jobs, also right in time for the year-end holidays. The list of big law firm layoffs, tracked by American Lawyer’s blog, goes on and on and on for pages.
Starbucks is hurting badly because nearly 30% of its stores are in Florida and California, two states hardest hit by the wave of foreclosures, and people just cannot pony up the dough for those $4 lattes anymore. Coupon clipping is officially back, Big-Time. In economically healthy years past, something like 1% of all coupons were actually redeemed, but, no longer: “I’ve looked at some data that show 94 percent say they’re using coupons in 2008,” according to Charles Brown, vice president for marketing services at NCH Marketing Services in Deerfield, Ill., a unit of Valassis Communications, reports the NYT.
Even India’s high-tech companies and outsourcing firms, long blamed for taking American jobs, are now feeling the recession, downsizing and laying off workers. Major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House, Houghton Mifflin, Penguin Group, and Harper Collins, among others, are cutting jobs and costs like mad. DuPont cut 2,500 jobs, right in time for Christmas too.
I saw an old man with a bunch of paired animals, building a boat this morning, driving in to my office. The old man said some of the animals are just too expensive and he was letting go the elephants, tigers and giraffes, because they were just too costly to feed.