Where are the jobs? For many companies, overseas

Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn't anyone hiring? Actually, many American companies are — just maybe not in your town. They're hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat. More than half of the 15,000 people that Caterpillar Inc. has hired this year were outside the U.S. UPS is also hiring at a faster clip overseas. For both companies, sales in international markets are growing at least twice as fast as domestically.

This is why America is doing do poorly..

All of the new jobs are going elsewhere and not staying here at home..

The trend helps explain why unemployment remains high in the United States, edging up to 9.8 percent last month, even though companies are performing well: All but 4 percent of the top 500 U.S. corporations reported profits this year, and the stock market is close to its highest point since the 2008 financial meltdown. But the jobs are going elsewhere. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, says Robert Scott, the institute's senior international economist.

source

With the future looking brighter overseas, companies are building there, too. Caterpillar, maker of the signature yellow bulldozers and tractors, has invested in three new plants in China in just the last two months to design and manufacture equipment. The decision is based on demand: Asia-Pacific sales soared 38 percent in the first nine months of the year, compared with 16 percent in the U.S. Caterpillar stock is up 65 percent this year.

DuPont's work force reflects the shift in its growth: In a presentation on emerging markets, the company said its number of employees in the U.S. shrank by 9 percent between January 2005 and October 2009. In the same period, its work force grew 54 percent in the Asia-Pacific countries.

Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent often points out that a billion consumers will enter the middle class during the coming decade, mostly in Africa, China and India. He is aggressively targeting those markets. Of Coke's 93,000 global employees, less than 13 percent were in the U.S. in 2009, down from 19 percent five years ago.

reply to post by baddmove


The stocks have been going up but the real question is who is buying them and is it the Fed that is propping up the market artificially?
After Nearly Two Years Searching - Trimtabs Still Can't Find Who is Doing All of the Buying

reply to post by baddmove


I'm sorry but you are definitely dead wrong in almost every way imaginable. Stop thinking of economics as politics. You can have opinions about politics and thats fine, but economics is all about facts and math.
The abundantly clear and giant change that is taking place in America that people such as yourself consistently ignore has been over the last few decades is government spending. Pretty much any and all free-market economists have been predicting the current economic trends in the USA based quite a bit on this chart here:
www.usgovernmentspending.com... &color=c&local=s

I'm sick and tired of people mentioning jobs going overseas as the cause of the crisis when its so obvious and predictable this economic situation would have happened with or without any Mexicans or Chinese people at all. The writing has been on the wall for decades hands down. This is what you always get (each and every time) when you have a country switch from capitalism (which no longer exists in America) to a command and control economy starting to root down in the US.

Capitalism exists *only* in Singapore and Hong Kong at the moment if you look at the economic freedom ranking found at:
www.heritage.org...

You think the population problem is bad in the USA? You have never been to Hong Kong then. By the Keynesian viewpoint they should be the worst economy in the world... basically a death trap. But their poor are fairing not too badly despite the obvious extreme overpopulation issue in Hong Kong because of a capitalist economy. By socialist predictions they should be dying in the streets left and right "because all the greedy capitalists are hoarding all the money", but that IS NOT happening at all. Whats going on in the USA today with blaming Mexicans and Chinese is no different than what went on in Germany when they blamed the Jews for all their problems.

The US was actually formed with the commerce and travel clause that was to FORCE states to accept immigration from neighbor states. You can go from Utah to New York and go and steal their jobs. You can move to NYC Queens and steal someone's job in the NYC Bronx. If you are so sure immigration is bad for economies then why aren't you advocating for a constitutional amendment so that your state can prevent other people from getting in? If you are so sure immigration is bad then why aren't you lobbying your city government to block off immigrants from moving in from neighbor cities?

Your whole "immigrants are stealing our jobs" comment is putting up a fake arbitrary line that doesn't make any sense at all. There is no "us" and "them"... that is just nationalist nonsense to make you think people born at 100' 1" deserve a job more than someone born at 100' 2". I'm sorry to break the news to you but your employer doesn't give a damn where you were born because you deserve the job if they think you can do it better not because you have a "nationalistically superior" place of birth. Its just laughable if you think about it long enough, that your place of birth should be a primary factor in your employment as an adult and that by just doing that those within the meaningless and arbitrary imaginary line of the US border will have an economy turn into a giggly wonderland. It doesn't work like that. What does work is the free marketplace.

We don't need immigration reform. We need welfare reform. Without welfare you suddenly eliminate close to 100% of the negative economic factors of immigration. I'm not so stupid as to claim that mass immigration cannot drive down salary but I'm also not so stupid as to claim slowing immigration will increase the *average salary of the lower classes* over the long term. No entirely opposite. If you reduce trade, travel, and immigration barriers then you are going to increase the average salary of the LOWER classes over the long term. That is the whole point of why you can move from Detroit to NYC without filling out an immigration request form with the state of New York. You can divide up the world however you want but ultimately its going to work best for the economy pretty much every time *without* the silly imaginary lines that supposedly make one group of people "more important" and "more deserving of jobs due to geographic birth coordinates" than another.

Economies work best when the most qualified person is placed in the job position. Any time you put in political barriers against that happening, such as having employers base their job placement on geographical birthplace coordinates (laughable) then you are going to end up with situations where a LESS THAN BEST QUALIFIED PERSON will be placed in the job position which of course is going to result in a worse off economy.

Originally posted by civilchallenger
reply to post by baddmove

 

I'm sorry but you are definitely dead wrong in almost every way imaginable.

Well, I guess that's that, 'cause you're so smart. One problem though... With this little gem...

Originally posted by civilchallenger

Stop thinking of economics as politics. You can have opinions about politics and thats fine, but economics is all about facts and math.

I respectfully (head bowed to the [obviously] superior intellect before me), disagree.

This particular line of thought is very common with (usually self professed) 'experts' of (what inevitably turns out to be) the good ol' school of 'Austrian Economics', (contemporary incarnation there-of at any rate) which I suspect you are.

Economics is politics. One cannot take out the human factor no matter how much more comfortable one is with pure data, and humans are messy, unpredictable things. (Please see above for examples... Yours and mine.)

reply to post by civilchallenger

Your whole "immigrants are stealing our jobs" comment is putting up a fake arbitrary line that doesn't make any sense at all

Whoa..slow down there hot rod..

I never said that, i'm just posting the fact that A lot of companies are out sourcing still..

Did you even read my thread?

I think this comment says it all...

How many products are made in the US these days? Do we even have a choice to purchase what we need anymore? I think China set up a bomb in this country through our wonderful Republican administrations dating back to the George H. Bush era. We are now reaping the benefits of slave labor in other countries. The cheap prices we pay for goods have a much higher price tag. Why would anyone support slave conditions anywhere in the world? This country used to be a great place to live. We made our own way and supported our own people. Now so many businesses are so greedy they don't care about the U.S. only their own pockets. Even companies in the U.S. that have jobs demand their workers accept slave wages and the number of hours they expect them to work are not supportive of families. The only way to reverse this trend is to tax not only products coming from companies overseas but to treat companies who produce more than 50% of their products outside the U.S. as foreign entities. I hope we can get the word out to all Americans that they have the purchasing power to help reclaim jobs in this country. Buy American whenever possible and if U.S. products are not available complain to the merchant to let them know what you want. Onward and upward! This is WAR!

bump..

second line...

reply to post by civilchallenger


A lot of big businesses used PATRIOTISM to accumulate the mass fortunes that they now have over the decades by tapping into Nationalism and national pride to help sell their product in a lot of their advertising.
So it seems politics and business do meet when it comes $$$. It just depends on who gets the most benefit from it at the time.

And exporting jobs is like exporting your countries future. If it keeps going on at the rate it is going, no one is going to have a job. Exporting jobs out and exporting cheap labour workers in means a very fast run to bottom of the barrel where you can no longer guarantee that your children and grandchildren will ever be able to work.
Its coming faster than we think.

Originally posted by ararisq
reply to post by baddmove

 

The stocks have been going up but the real question is who is buying them and is it the Fed that is propping up the market artificially?
After Nearly Two Years Searching - Trimtabs Still Can't Find Who is Doing All of the Buying

Here is your answer:
The Fed is rigging the Market

And the Video:
Following the Fund Flows

Originally posted by redhorse

Originally posted by civilchallenger
reply to post by baddmove

 

I'm sorry but you are definitely dead wrong in almost every way imaginable.

Well, I guess that's that, 'cause you're so smart. One problem though... With this little gem...

No, its not because I'm so smart. Its because I can do a basic Google search for all the facts and all the facts seem to suggest sending jobs overseas does *not* hurt economies and does *not* increase poverty. And if it did, again, you are being unrightfully nationalistic because people in other countries are people too and deserve a job just as much as you do.

reply to post by civilchallenger


Of course the people in China and India deserve jobs. They deserve access to whatever industries they can attract as well as access to whatever products any company can legally and profitably sell there.

The problem is that American corporations are moving the JOBS overseas to take advantage of cheap labor - all while taking full advantage of EVERY American subsidy, tax shelter, etc. that they can possibly get... Subsidies and shelters which were created with the intent of making companies interested in creating jobs FOR Americans.

Another illusory factor is that, as Americans, we became accustomed to rising prices and the explanation that such increases in pricing were caused by wage increases for the company workers. Now what have we got? The same HIGH prices while these corporations have slashed their payroll budgets by moving to nations which have either no minimum wage, or a nearly non existent one. And who benefits from this bait and switch shell game? Corporations, stock holders, and the politicians that they spend billions, annually, buying off.

Our entire system has been hijacked, deregulated, and subverted by people who just don't care if we survive a a nation or as a people. They only see, and serve, their own greed. The entire system has been deregulated to the point of absurdity, lending itself almost universally towards exploitation and abuse. Oh, and the funniest part? In the midst of this deregulated nightmare of corporate corruption and avarice - they actually convince people that the problem isn't that the rules are bent far too heavily in their favor...

They convince some people that the few rules left are to blame. Amazing.

~Heff

Can I add, as a Brit, that the same thing is happening in Britain and, to an extent at least, in Western Europe too. All that seems to matter to Big Business is getting cheap labour so as to pay big dividends to the Shareholders. I cannot see how this can continue in the long-term.

The problem is that Execs only think about the next Share Dividend while Politicians only look as far ahead as the next Election. But the population is in it for the long term.

reply to post by Hefficide


Well said Heff..

Well said..thank you for that reply

Originally posted by Hefficide
reply to post by civilchallenger

 

The problem is that American corporations are moving the JOBS overseas to take advantage of cheap labor - all while taking full advantage of EVERY American subsidy, tax shelter, etc. that they can possibly get... Subsidies and shelters which were created with the intent of making companies interested in creating jobs FOR Americans.

Well in that case we've found some common ground. I'm certainly a very big fan of eliminating corporate subsidies and foreign aid (not that its a big piece of the budget any more). That would certainly hugely help. The situation cannot improve all that much for one big reason though. Corporations are entities that you *pay money for* to get *rights* that other people do not have. The very concept of a corporation is corrupt to the core and cannot be fixed except by eliminating corporations completely.. I don't mean just dissolve the whole company. The shareholders should still get ownership to a company but it should not be in the format of a corporation.

Marriage licenses work the same way. You pay money to the state and in return you get rights and privileges that others don't have. I certainly don't expect to do that at any point.