Job(loss)-full of errors

Job losses from Great Recession about to get worse - Yahoo! Finance: "Job losses during the Great Recession have been huge and they're about to get bigger.

When the Labor Department releases the January unemployment report Friday, it will also update its estimate of jobs lost in the year that ended in March 2009. The number is expected to rise by roughly 800,000, raising the number of jobs shed during the recession to around 8 million."

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That's a revision of around 11% of the original numbers. The market gets fixated on the weekly numbers.

A not-twit data point

The young prefer Facebook to blogging, Twitter - USATODAY.com: "Teens are eating up Facebook but are not so keen on Twitter, and they are not blogging as much as they used to, according to the Pew Internet Project's report.

Lenhart says blogging among teens and young adults has plummeted to half what it was in 2006. In that year, 28% of teens ages 12-17 and adults ages 18-29 were bloggers. By the fall of 2009, the numbers had dropped to 14% of teens and 15% of young adults. During the same period, the percentage of online adults over 30 who were bloggers rose from 7% in 2006 to 11% in 2009.

"What we think is really going on here — why young people aren't doing blogs anymore — is that there's been a move fromMySpace, which put blogging front and center, to Facebook, which doesn't have that," Lenhart says.

The report also indicates that wireless connectivity is high among adults under 30, and social networking continues to climb.

But Twitter hasn't gained much ground with teens — only 8% of 12- to 17-year-olds who go online say they ever use it. That's unusual, because teenagers have a history of being early adopters of nearly every online activity, Lenhart says.

Lenhart says researchers asked some teens in focus groups about their Twitter perceptions.

"Most had no idea what it was," Lenhart says. "Some knew it as 'that thing Lance Armstrong and other celebrities do.' "

She says there may be a perception with Twitter that you have to "feed the beast," and that may keep them away, Lenhart says.

Selling...a (fictitious) Narrative

The Murdoch/Ailes Fox Network provides a good case study in Strategy...

Clearly it has "outsold" its competitors in "selling" a narrative.

But whether the public should be sold a "narrative" of "news" is a question that Fox does not ask.

Stewart tells O'Reilly he's voice of sanity on Fox - Yahoo! Finance: "Fox 'is the most passionate and sells the clearest narrative of all the news networks, if ... you're still referring to it in that manner,' Stewart said.

O'Reilly pointed out that Fox is like a newspaper with news and opinion pages, an idea Stewart poked fun at.

'Fox in and of itself doesn't say you're a news network all day,' he said. 'What is it, you're news from 9 to 11, then you're opinion, then you're news again from 1 to 2:30 except for the Jewish holidays? And then on alternate parking days you're news, but Christmas, you're not?'"

Walking away....from Values

As Values Slide, More Weigh Walking Away From Mortgages - NYTimes.com: "...The number of Americans who owed more than their homes were worth was virtually nil when the real estate collapse began in mid-2006, but by the third quarter of 2009, an estimated 4.5 million homeowners had reached the critical threshold, with their home’s value dropping below 75 percent of the mortgage balance. They are stretched, aggrieved and restless. With figures released last week showing that the real estate market was stalling again, their numbers are now projected to climb to a peak of 5.1 million by June — about 10 percent of all Americans with mortgages..."

This article describes mortgage holders who have either walked away or are considering walking away from their mortgages. A few points are worth considering.

1. Perhaps no one with a mortgage should be called a homeowner if the bank "owns" the house. Quite a few comments on the NYT article suggested that the mortgage holders (MH) should walk away because the bank took the risk and the house belongs to the bank. However, the technicality is that the house is purchased by the owner, and the bank only has a lien on it. So the mortgage holder takes the risk for the value of the property- the bank takes a risk on the ability of the mortgage holder to pay the amount. Hence ethical values suggest that a mortgage holder, if capable of paying the monthly amount of the mortgage, should pay irrespective of the value of the house. That is the contract the mortgage holder agreed to.
2. Any effort by the government to fund a bail-out of the MH that is piled on the tax payers creates Moral Hazards. More importantly, it saddles everyone with the burden of paying for the mistakes of the MH and the banks. Since the banks made lots of money selling and trading these mortgages, why not force the management of the banks to write down all these loans to the current value of the properties? When the shareholders take a bath perhaps the management of the banks would start cleaning their brains.