Bing Gordon, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, says that his venture capital firm has to gear up for the coming tech boom. That’s one reason that his company hired famous Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker as a new partner on Monday.
Meeker’s investing focus at the firm will be on the Internet and how the shift to mobile will create huge new opportunities, Gordon said in an interview.
Gordon is sitting pretty himself as the backer of Kleiner’s investments in mobile gaming firm Ngmoco, which was bought by DeNA for $403 million, and Zynga, the hot social gaming company that is valued at $5.6 billion.
“She thinks big and thinks global,” Gordon (pictured right) said. “Among the analysts, she is my favorite personality. She makes fearless macro bets and is right most of the time.”
Gordon said he sees a big boom coming, not a bubble, much like Kleiner’s managing partner John Doerr, who said that we’re in the midst of yet another boom for internet investments at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. The reason is that he sees a lot of technologies that are changing the way we live.
“The world of digital media is being transformed,” Gordon said. “A bunch of new businesses can be reinvented, thanks to social graphs, the mobile internet, and the new shopping habits of the young. Those are going to create a whole generation of cool new companies. Mary has the right stuff to help people take advantage of the opportunities.”
As for his own focus, Gordon said he is fascinated how users are dealing with the information overload from the social internet and how users are building their own social capital. He is also interested in the “new algorithms, data structures and network topologies of the social web.” He is looking at the intersection of mobile operating systems, the social web, and entertainment. He is also interested in gamification, or making non-game applications more fun and engaging by making them more game-like.
Beyond spotting trends, Meeker will now have to pick the right companies and entrepreneurs that are riding those trends. Meeker will focus on Kleiner’s digital investments, which largely means the social and mobile Internet. But Gordon said that renewed emphasis on internet companies doesn’t mean that the company is backing off completely on big cleantech investments.
“If you look at our cleantech and life science press releases, you can see there are other partner recruitments happening there too,” he said.
Kleiner has a new fund, the sFund, to invest in social Internet companies. But Gordon said it isn’t easy to predict whether Kleiner will invest more money in 2011 than it will in 2010.
[photo credit: SF Business Journal]
Next Story: LinkedIn joins the article-sharing party Previous Story: NewsBasis: Death to the bad PR pitch!
Next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the "American economy" is doing these days, watch your wallet.
There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.
The one that's mending is America's Big Money economy. It's comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives.
The Big Money economy is doing well these days. That's partly thanks to Ben Bernanke, whose Fed is keeping interest rates near zero by printing money as fast as it dare. It's essentially free money to America's Big Money economy.
Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They're merging and acquiring other companies.
And they're going abroad in search of customers.
Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They're selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America's biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.
So don't worry about America's Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America's largest corporations are heading upward.
But there's another American economy, and it's not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.
Last Friday's jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That's better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 24,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.
Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force -- including everyone too discouraged to look for a job -- we're down about 22 million.
Or to put it another way, we're still getting nowhere on jobs.
One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn't working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.
And that means the bills aren't getting paid.
According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans -- 53 percent -- are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.
Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.
Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.
And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can't refinance their homes. They can't get home equity loans. Banks don't want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.
And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.
Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.
Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren't so sure. The economy has been so bad they're angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.
But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu sus planes de <b> propio entretenimiento de noticias </ b> muestran, pero a nadie ver? Como Peter Kafka en informes MediaMemo, Hulu es actualmente el casting para un presentador de la serie que se publica todos los días, teniendo una 'Daily Show' al estilo de enfoque satírico de las últimas noticias de entretenimiento. Hulu (respaldado por EE.UU. gigantes de televisión NBC ...
Lujiazui habitaciones: <b> Noticias </ b> & puntos de vista sobre las existencias de China (06 de diciembre <b> ...</ b> Inversores y los comerciantes en el principal distrito financiero de China se trata de lo siguiente antes de que comience el comercio de hoy: Con las expectativas sobre la inflación y la política monetaria cada vez más claro, los inversores están tomando las señales desde el extranjero ...
Película <b> Noticias </ b> Rápida Hits: Emma Stone ' ' s Spider-Man Mira ', Annie Asiente <b> ...</ b> Publicado 06 de diciembre 2010 15:05 Archivado en:. Remolques . y clips, películas Noticias, Festival de Cine Sundance, Cinematical email - Emma Stone estrenó su look de Spider-Man por primera vez a Trevor vivo en Hollywood el fin de semana ....
.
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Bing Gordon, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, says that his venture capital firm has to gear up for the coming tech boom. That’s one reason that his company hired famous Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker as a new partner on Monday.
Meeker’s investing focus at the firm will be on the Internet and how the shift to mobile will create huge new opportunities, Gordon said in an interview.
Gordon is sitting pretty himself as the backer of Kleiner’s investments in mobile gaming firm Ngmoco, which was bought by DeNA for $403 million, and Zynga, the hot social gaming company that is valued at $5.6 billion.
“She thinks big and thinks global,” Gordon (pictured right) said. “Among the analysts, she is my favorite personality. She makes fearless macro bets and is right most of the time.”
Gordon said he sees a big boom coming, not a bubble, much like Kleiner’s managing partner John Doerr, who said that we’re in the midst of yet another boom for internet investments at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. The reason is that he sees a lot of technologies that are changing the way we live.
“The world of digital media is being transformed,” Gordon said. “A bunch of new businesses can be reinvented, thanks to social graphs, the mobile internet, and the new shopping habits of the young. Those are going to create a whole generation of cool new companies. Mary has the right stuff to help people take advantage of the opportunities.”
As for his own focus, Gordon said he is fascinated how users are dealing with the information overload from the social internet and how users are building their own social capital. He is also interested in the “new algorithms, data structures and network topologies of the social web.” He is looking at the intersection of mobile operating systems, the social web, and entertainment. He is also interested in gamification, or making non-game applications more fun and engaging by making them more game-like.
Beyond spotting trends, Meeker will now have to pick the right companies and entrepreneurs that are riding those trends. Meeker will focus on Kleiner’s digital investments, which largely means the social and mobile Internet. But Gordon said that renewed emphasis on internet companies doesn’t mean that the company is backing off completely on big cleantech investments.
“If you look at our cleantech and life science press releases, you can see there are other partner recruitments happening there too,” he said.
Kleiner has a new fund, the sFund, to invest in social Internet companies. But Gordon said it isn’t easy to predict whether Kleiner will invest more money in 2011 than it will in 2010.
[photo credit: SF Business Journal]
Next Story: LinkedIn joins the article-sharing party Previous Story: NewsBasis: Death to the bad PR pitch!
Next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the "American economy" is doing these days, watch your wallet.
There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.
The one that's mending is America's Big Money economy. It's comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives.
The Big Money economy is doing well these days. That's partly thanks to Ben Bernanke, whose Fed is keeping interest rates near zero by printing money as fast as it dare. It's essentially free money to America's Big Money economy.
Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They're merging and acquiring other companies.
And they're going abroad in search of customers.
Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They're selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America's biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.
So don't worry about America's Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America's largest corporations are heading upward.
But there's another American economy, and it's not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.
Last Friday's jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That's better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 24,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.
Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force -- including everyone too discouraged to look for a job -- we're down about 22 million.
Or to put it another way, we're still getting nowhere on jobs.
One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn't working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.
And that means the bills aren't getting paid.
According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans -- 53 percent -- are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.
Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.
Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.
And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can't refinance their homes. They can't get home equity loans. Banks don't want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.
And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.
Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.
Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren't so sure. The economy has been so bad they're angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.
But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Bing Gordon, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, says that his venture capital firm has to gear up for the coming tech boom. That’s one reason that his company hired famous Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker as a new partner on Monday.
Meeker’s investing focus at the firm will be on the Internet and how the shift to mobile will create huge new opportunities, Gordon said in an interview.
Gordon is sitting pretty himself as the backer of Kleiner’s investments in mobile gaming firm Ngmoco, which was bought by DeNA for $403 million, and Zynga, the hot social gaming company that is valued at $5.6 billion.
“She thinks big and thinks global,” Gordon (pictured right) said. “Among the analysts, she is my favorite personality. She makes fearless macro bets and is right most of the time.”
Gordon said he sees a big boom coming, not a bubble, much like Kleiner’s managing partner John Doerr, who said that we’re in the midst of yet another boom for internet investments at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. The reason is that he sees a lot of technologies that are changing the way we live.
“The world of digital media is being transformed,” Gordon said. “A bunch of new businesses can be reinvented, thanks to social graphs, the mobile internet, and the new shopping habits of the young. Those are going to create a whole generation of cool new companies. Mary has the right stuff to help people take advantage of the opportunities.”
As for his own focus, Gordon said he is fascinated how users are dealing with the information overload from the social internet and how users are building their own social capital. He is also interested in the “new algorithms, data structures and network topologies of the social web.” He is looking at the intersection of mobile operating systems, the social web, and entertainment. He is also interested in gamification, or making non-game applications more fun and engaging by making them more game-like.
Beyond spotting trends, Meeker will now have to pick the right companies and entrepreneurs that are riding those trends. Meeker will focus on Kleiner’s digital investments, which largely means the social and mobile Internet. But Gordon said that renewed emphasis on internet companies doesn’t mean that the company is backing off completely on big cleantech investments.
“If you look at our cleantech and life science press releases, you can see there are other partner recruitments happening there too,” he said.
Kleiner has a new fund, the sFund, to invest in social Internet companies. But Gordon said it isn’t easy to predict whether Kleiner will invest more money in 2011 than it will in 2010.
[photo credit: SF Business Journal]
Next Story: LinkedIn joins the article-sharing party Previous Story: NewsBasis: Death to the bad PR pitch!
Next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the "American economy" is doing these days, watch your wallet.
There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.
The one that's mending is America's Big Money economy. It's comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives.
The Big Money economy is doing well these days. That's partly thanks to Ben Bernanke, whose Fed is keeping interest rates near zero by printing money as fast as it dare. It's essentially free money to America's Big Money economy.
Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They're merging and acquiring other companies.
And they're going abroad in search of customers.
Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They're selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America's biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.
So don't worry about America's Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America's largest corporations are heading upward.
But there's another American economy, and it's not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.
Last Friday's jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That's better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 24,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.
Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force -- including everyone too discouraged to look for a job -- we're down about 22 million.
Or to put it another way, we're still getting nowhere on jobs.
One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn't working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.
And that means the bills aren't getting paid.
According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans -- 53 percent -- are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.
Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.
Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.
And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can't refinance their homes. They can't get home equity loans. Banks don't want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.
And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.
Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.
Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren't so sure. The economy has been so bad they're angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.
But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Lujiazui Breakfast: <b>News</b> & Views About China Stocks (Dec. 6 <b>...</b>
Investors and traders in China's main financial district are talking about the following before the start of trade today: With expectations about inflation and monetary policy becoming clearer, investors are taking cues from overseas ...
Movie <b>News</b> Quick Hits: Emma Stone's 'Spider-Man' Look, Annie Nods <b>...</b>
Posted Dec 6th 2010 3:05PM. Filed under: Trailers and Clips, Movie News, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical. Email This. -- Emma Stone debuted her Spider-Man look for the first time at Trevor Live in Hollywood over the weekend. ...
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