The companies cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show. That’s a big switch from the 1990s, when they added jobs everywhere: 4.4 million in the U.S. and 2.7 million abroad.

In all, U.S. multinationals employed 21.1 million people at home in 2009 and 10.3 million elsewhere, including increasing numbers of higher-skilled foreign workers.

The trend highlights the growing importance of other economies, particularly in rapidly growing Asia, to big U.S. businesses such as General Electric Co., Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

The data also underscore the vulnerability of the U.S. economy, particularly at a time when unemployment is high and wages aren’t rising. Jobs at multinationals tend to pay above-average wages and, for decades, sustained the American middle class.
http://online.wsj.com/video/news-hub-globalization-means-less-us-jobs/07B46F49-FAB4-496A-93A4-53EB31D20762.html

Is there a direct correlation between suicide rates and the health of the economy?

NYT- The suicide rate increased 3 percent in the 2001 recession and has generally ridden the tide of the economy since the Great Depression, rising in bad times and falling in good ones, according to a comprehensive government analysis released Thursday.

Experts said the new study may help clarify a long-clouded relationship between suicide and economic trends.

While many researchers have argued that economic hardship can raise the likelihood of suicide in people who are already vulnerable — like those with depression or other mental illnesses — research has been mixed. Some studies have supported such a link, but others have found the opposite: that rates drop in periods of high unemployment, as if people exhibit resilience when they need it most.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/health/research/15suicide.html
Using more comprehensive data to nail down economic trends, the new study found a clear correlation between suicide rates and the business cycle among young and middle-age adults. That correlation vanished when researchers looked only at children and the elderly. It may not be the case that economic troubles cause suicide attempts, but they can be factors.

“They did a nice job of adding a piece to a very complex puzzle,” said Eve Moscicki, a researcher at the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education who was not involved in the study. “It may be that when people who are more vulnerable to suicide to begin with lose a job or get a pay cut, it adds one more stressor.”

In the study, which appears in The American Journal of Public Health, researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined suicide rates per 100,000 Americans for every year from 1928 to 2007.

Crude oil fell 3.3%, leading a broad reversal of the rally that had recently sent prices for copper, cotton and other commodities to record highs.

Oil prices have now dropped 5.8% this week, after spiking in recent months amid Middle East unrest.

Oil’s dip came after the International Energy Agency, which represents big oil-consuming nations, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries both reported that demand is weakening amid high prices. Saudi Arabia has cut back production after ratcheting it up just a few weeks ago amid fighting in Libya, another major exporter.

Crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange settled on Tuesday at $106.25 a barrel, though prices are still up 16% this year.

Stocks also dropped broadly. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.9%, its biggest daily drop in almost a month. Renewed worries about contamination from Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant also weighed on stocks.

Tokyo’s Nikkei stock average dropped 1.7%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index lost 1.3%, and Germany’s DAX declined 1.4%.

Surging prices for raw materials have been stoking rising fears of inflation in recent months.

But Tuesday’s simultaneous drop in stocks, oil and other basic goods underscored another immediate threat: that commodities have become too costly for cash-strapped customers still contending with high unemployment.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703518704576259102663482010.html

Jeff Bennett/The Wall Street Journal The Michigan State Fairgrounds & Exposition Center, above on Sunday, stores new Dodge Ram pickup trucks awaiting space on freight cars.

WSJ – Already rattled by a looming shortage of made-in-Japan parts, Detroit auto makers are struggling with rail shipping woes that are stalling deliveries of finished vehicles.

About 4,000 brand new Chrysler Group LLC vehicles, mostly Ram pickup trucks, are parked under guard at the Michigan State Fairgrounds & Exposition Center in Detroit. General Motors Co. says it has delayed vehicle shipments by a day or two for as many as 1,000 cars at a time, and Ford Motor Co. is storing finished pickups at a closed assembly plant in Wixom, Mich., and at a lot near downtown Dearborn, Mich.

As the U.S. economy contracted during the recession, railroad operators put hundreds of thousands of rail cars into storage and cut their staffs. Now that shipments of autos, coal and consumer goods are rising again, the nation’s railroads don’t have enough rolling stock for fast deliveries.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703385404576258994245530196.html

Job applicants in line at a job fair in San Jose, Calif., last week.

NYT – The United States economy showed signs of kicking into gear in March, adding 216,000 jobs and prompting President Obama to proclaim a corner finally turned.

The president and his fellow Democrats pointed to the latest jobs report on Friday, and to an unemployment rate that fell a touch to 8.8 percent, as evidence that their policies, like stimulus spending and the payroll tax cut, were working. All of this, they made clear, could become ammunition in their showdown with House Republicans, who have spoken of cutting deeply into the federal budget and have threatened a government shutdown.

An emboldened Mr. Obama spoke of the political implications before several hundred workers at a United Parcel Service shipping center in Landover, Md.

“If these budget negotiations break down, we could end up having to shut down the government, just at a time when the economy is starting to recover,” Mr. Obama told the workers. “So given the encouraging news we received today on jobs, it would be the height of irresponsibility to halt our economic momentum because of the same old Washington politics.”

Administration officials hit the same points over and over on Friday. The private sector has added, on average, 188,000 jobs in the first three months of 2011, and 1.8 million jobs since the recovery began. March was the 12th consecutive month of private sector job growth, and the stock market moved slightly higher on the report from the Labor Department.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/business/economy/02jobs.html

Horizontal axis shows months. Vertical axis shows the ratio of that month’s nonfarm payrolls to the nonfarm payrolls at the start of recession. Note: Because employment is a lagging indicator, the dates for these employment trends are not exactly synchronized with National Bureau of Economic Research’s official business cycle dates.

NYT – The United States added 216,000 jobs on net in March, the Labor Department reported today, slightly faster growth than the February gain, which was revised slightly to 194,000. March also represented the 13th straight month of net job gains in the private sector.

Job gains were relatively widespread — nearly ever major sector added employees, or at least kept payrolls flat — but the industries with the biggest gains were professional and business services, health care, leisure and hospitality, and mining. The biggest loser was local government, which has lost 416,000 jobs since its payrolls peaked in September 2008.

Even most of the winners, though, have a long way to go before returning to their prerecession levels, if they ever do.

The chart above shows economywide job changes in this last recession and recovery compared with other recent ones, with the black line representing the current downturn. Since the downturn began in December 2007, the economy has shed, on net, about 5.3 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs. And that doesn’t even account for the fact that the working-age population has continued to grow, meaning that if the economy were healthy we should have more jobs today than we had before the recession.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/comparing-recoveries-job-changes-5/

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/podcast-jobs-wages-and-middle-class-costs/

An appliance store in Tokyo operated under dimmed lights to save electricity, part of a national push toward conservation after the tsunami and nuclear crisis.

NYT – TOKYO — Even in a country whose people are known for walking in lockstep, a national consensus on the proper code of behavior has emerged with startling speed. Consider post-tsunami Japan as the age of voluntary self-restraint, or jishuku, the antipode of the Japan of the “bubble” era that celebrated excess.

With hundreds of thousands of people displaced up north from the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis, anything with the barest hint of luxury invites condemnation. There were only general calls for conservation, but within days of the March 11 quake, Japanese of all stripes began turning off lights, elevators, heaters and even toilet seat warmers.

But self-restraint goes beyond the need to compensate for shortages of electricity brought on by the closing of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. At a time of collective mourning, jishuku also demands that self-restraint be practiced elsewhere. Candidates in next month’s local elections are hewing to the ethos by literally campaigning quietly for votes, instead of circling neighborhoods in their usual campaign trucks with blaring loudspeakers.

With aggressive sales tactics suddenly rendered unseemly, the giant Bic Camera electric appliance outlet in central Tokyo has dropped the decibels on its incessant in-store jingle, usually audible half a block away. At the high school baseball tournament in Osaka, bands put away their instruments; instead, cheering sections have been clapping by hitting plastic horns together.

There are also doubts about whether it is proper to partake in the seasonal pleasures that regulate much of Japanese life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/world/asia/28tokyo.html