Business World

Month by month, the U.S. job market is regaining its health.

So many jobs are being added that the unemployment rate has dropped for five straight months. At 8.3 percent, it’s at a three-year low.

Whether the job market actually feels stronger, though, depends on your perspective.

The headline numbers mask vast disparities _ from the New Yorker thrilled to have found a catering job to the Indianapolis truck driver forced to take a 40 percent pay cut to work again.

Even where hiring has picked up, scars from the Great Recession remain. In Fort Madison, Iowa, Pinnacle Foods Group is expanding a canned-meat plant and adding 65 jobs. Yet that same work used to be done at a company plant in Tacoma, Wash., that once employed 160 but has since closed.

A government report Friday that employers added a surprising 243,000 jobs in January ignited cheers for the job market, which had been slow to recover in the 2 1/2 years since the recession officially ended. Many economists see signs of a self-fulfilling “virtuous cycle,” in which more jobs fuel more consumer spending, which sparks further hiring and spending and more jobs.

The presidential election is sure to be determined, in part, by how Americans interpret the shifts in the job market.

Here’s how things look to employers, job seekers and analysts with varying views of the job market:

_ THE RELIEVED AND THE HOPEFUL

Robb Stiffler landed a job two weeks ago at Crown College, a liberal arts college in St. Bonifacius, Minn. He makes sure rooms are available and set up for school events. Stiffler used to run his own company selling paint sprayers. But the housing bust put him out of business.

Then, in nine months in real estate, he sold one house. At first, he lived off his credit cards. Then it was unemployment benefits.

He was elated to get the Crown job, his first to provide a retirement plan. Unemployment, he says, “was agony.”

Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co. is opening a plant in Galax, Va., near the North Carolina border. It expects to hire 50 workers by July and perhaps 65 more over the next year or two.

January’s buoyant national job numbers “play right into what we have already sensed and begun to act on,” says Doug Bassett, the chief operating officer.

The company’s revenue has risen 20 percent in the past two months compared with the same period a year earlier. Vaughan-Bassett credits an improving economy, rising interest in U.S.-made products and higher prices on Chinese imports it competes with.

Across the country, Ancestry.com, which helps track family lineage, expects to add 150 employees this year _ if it can find them.

The company, based in Provo, Utah, must compete with technology firms for engineers with expertise in artificial intelligence and in handling mountains of data (30 million family trees in Ancestry’s case).

“It’s only gotten harder” to find qualified applicants as the job market has improved, says Eric Shoup, senior vice president. “The likes of Google, Zynga, Facebook and others are also growing. They are soaking these people up.”

James Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management, says the stock market’s celebration of Friday’s jobs report was another step in reversing Americans’ economic pessimism.

“For me, the takeaway isn’t so much about the healing of the job market as it is about the beginning of an attitude adjustment for this country,” Paulsen said.

Michael Biggers of Brooklyn, N.Y., was happy to land a job recently at a catering company.

The job hunt took four months. Unemployment benefits helped pay the bills. And his four kids, ages 3 to 12, loved having him home. Biggers, 32, just wishes he didn’t have to apply for jobs online.

“I feel like I would have found something faster if I met with a person face to face,” Biggers says. “I’m just confident about me.”

Perhaps no one has more reason to applaud the improving job numbers than President Barack Obama. His re-election hopes rest heavily on whether most voters will agree that the economy has improved on his watch.

“The recovery is speeding up,” Obama said after the January employment report was released.

_ THE CAUTIOUS AND THE SKEPTICAL

In a few weeks, entrepreneur Joe Wong will open a restaurant overseeing the Sacramento River in Redding, Calif. The eatery, View 202, will employ 100.

But Wong, president of J&A Food Service, isn’t convinced the economy is improving. He knows he’ll have to keep menu prices down to attract the budget-conscious. Unemployment still exceeds 11 percent in Redding.

“We’ll probably have 1,000 apply” for jobs, Wong says. The January jobs report is “going to get everybody excited. But we’ve heard it before. It just comes back down.”

Farther south, the economy is only starting to improve in California’s Riverside and San Bernardino counties, an area that was clobbered when housing prices plunged.

“We still have large numbers of foreclosures on the books, and property values and sales taxes are also lagging behind projections,” says Tom Freeman, a Riverside County commissioner.

At least, Freeman says, businesses that sell goods overseas have been a bright spot.

In downtown Indianapolis, Windsor Jewelry hired a part-time worker for the holidays, then made him full-time as demand held up. Owner Greg Bires says he might hire another person this year. Business is a little steadier now.

Still, rising gold prices have pinched the company.

“That’s been the biggest problem _ just not knowing what tomorrow was going to bring,” Bires says. “So we’ve been kind of afraid to make any major changes.”

Among the highest-profile skeptics of an improving job market is Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner in the presidential race.

On Friday, Romney blamed Obama’s policies for slowing the recovery, hurting families and making it harder for businesses to rebound.

“And for that,” Romney said at a campaign stop in Nevada, “the president deserves the blame that he’ll receive in this campaign.”

_ THE DISCOURAGED

Job seekers still face tough odds. There are still more than four unemployed Americans, on average, for every job opening. In a healthy economy, by contrast, that ratio would be roughly 2-to-1.

Sara Pereda, an executive assistant in New York City’s entertainment industry, has applied for several job openings and received no responses, even though she’s sure she was qualified. The same for many of her friends. Pereda, 30, has been seeking a job with more opportunity for advancement.

“You can send out 10 resumes and get one _ and that’s a maybe,” Pereda says.

In Buffalo, N.Y., Rosanne DiPizio, vice president of her family’s DiPizio Construction, says there isn’t enough work for her company to justify hiring right now. It relies mostly on government road-construction contracts. And governments have been cutting back.

DiPizio also runs a concrete plant that would normally employ 100. It’s down to 85.

“We will employ more if we have more work,” she says. “It’s that simple.”

Jeff Searcy says fewer people are showing up at a support group he runs for job hunters at a church in Charlotte, N.C. Searcy isn’t sure why. The area is suffering from 9.9 percent unemployment, far above the national average.

“We know it’s not because everyone has found a job,” Searcy says.

His theory?

“After you’ve been to 10 lectures on networking, how much more can you learn?”

Aaron Cruz of Indianapolis says that while hiring has picked up, there’s a catch: Landing a job can mean accepting part-time work or a pay cut. Cruz lost his job as a truck driver in December 2008. He didn’t find full-time work again until last June.

His old job paid $23 an hour; his new one, $14.

“The money I’m making now at this new job … I made in my mid-20s,” he says. “I’m 42 now.”

He doesn’t put much stock in better employment numbers. People forced to take part-time jobs once they exhaust their unemployment aid, Cruz notes, aren’t counted as unemployed. Yet they still struggle.

“Every time I hear them, I doubt the numbers,” he says.

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Dow Chemical Co. said Thursday it posted a loss in the fourth-quarter because of a one-time charge that caused it to pay higher taxes at its Brazilian operations.

Shares fell nearly 3 percent in trading before the opening bell.

The Midland, Mich. company, the nation’s largest chemical maker, reported a loss of $20 million, or 2 cents per share, compared with a year-ago profit of $426 million, or 37 cents per share. Excluding a charge of 27 cents per share, Dow would have earned 25 cents per share in the quarter.

Revenue rose 2 percent to $14.1 billion.

Results were below Wall Street’s expectations. Analysts polled by FactSet expected a profit, excluding items, of 31 cents per share on revenue of $14 Business Card Holders.18 billion.

Volume fell 3 percent in the quarter. Demand slipped as customers in North America, Europe and other regions worked through existing inventory instead of replenishing their stockpiles. Dow says it saw global economic “deterioration” in the period, with “considerable weakness” in Western Europe. Europe accounts for a quarter of the company’s sales.

Prices rose 5 percent, offsetting higher feedstock and energy costs.

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The free credit score industry has been booming since the recession as a lot of people hit hard times and want to keep an eye on how the recession has affected their credit standing.

A report showing the government will run a budget deficit of more than $1 trillion for the fourth consecutive year inflamed a debate over the federal shortfall that

Ever since oil was discovered in the North Sea off the British coast in December 1969, the Scottish National Party claimed it for Scotland.

Now in power and closer than ever to a referendum on whether to break from the U.K. after more than 300 years, the SNP government in Edinburgh led by Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond is counting on tax revenue from the oil industry as a key pillar of the economy along with financial services.

President Barack Obama is considering nominating Lawrence Summers, his former National Economic Council director, to lead the World Bank when Robert Zoellick

Opening arguments are to resume today in the trial of three former Nortel Networks Corp. senior executives accused of fabricating profits to trigger multi-million dollar bonus payouts.

Chief prosecutor Robert Hubbard is expected to continue laying out the Crown

European Central Bank Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny said Standard & Poor

High unemployment has sent many Americans back to school, and they’re taking on big debt to finance their education. 

Americans now owe more on in student loans, $750 billion, than on their credit cards.

Lenders are getting very worried about that.  Sixty-seven percent of bank risk managers expect a rise in student loan delinquencies, according to a new survey for FICO, the credit scoring company, and the Professional Risk Managers Association.  That number is 17 points higher than last summer.

You can find FICO’s press release here and the study here.

Many for-profit private trade schools, the kind that advertise on afternoon TV, have online payday advance.stltoday.com/business/columns/jim-gallagher/students-should-look-at-loan-default-rates-to-judge-colleges/article_fa88b67f-51e7-5e16-b1ca-1688d2ee0a6c.html”> student loan default rates of over 20 percent.  Those schools often charge outrageous tuition, and the high default rates indicate that many students are worse off for attending.

The best deals in vocational training are found at community colleges, where tuition is cheap. 

Those looking for a bachelors degree should consider whether a high-tuition private university really delivers value that justifies its price.  State universities are usually cheaper.

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China and the United States have pledged during a visit by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to cooperate on boosting the global economic recovery, but Chinese backing for U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil industry appeared unlikely.

China buys almost one-third of Iran’s oil exports and has rejected the U.S. sanctions as a tool to rein in Tehran’s nuclear program. That sets Washington up for a public setback if the government of the world’s second-largest economy refuses to cooperate.

Geithner was expected to make the U.S. case for sanctions in meetings Wednesday with Premier Wen Jiabao, Vice President Xi Jinping _ who is in line to become China’s next leader _ and Vice Premier Li Keqiang, another rising star.

Geithner met with his counterpart, Vice Premier Wang Qishan, on Tuesday night. He said he told Wang that the two sides “share so many important interests, and among those are increasing our cooperation on global economic issues.”

China’s official Xinhua News Agency said China and the United States pledged to further cooperate to boost the global economic recovery, and quoted Wang as saying the world economic situation is still “very complex and grim.”

Wang also called on the United States to loosen export controls of high-tech products to China, one of China’s complaints about the countries’ trade relationship. U.S. critics, meanwhile, say Chinese currency controls keep the yuan undervalued and give its exporters an unfair advantage, distorting trade at a time when Washington and other governments are under pressure to bring down unemployment.

China’s trade surplus with the United States widened 24.2 percent to $17.4 billion in December, according to data released Tuesday.

Geithner also is due to visit Tokyo, another major buyer of Iranian oil, for talks after he leaves Beijing on Thursday morning.

China has criticized U.S. sanctions on Iran, approved by President Barack Obama on New Year’s Eve, as improper and ineffective. Beijing supported U.N. sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program but says action should be multilateral.

The sanctions would target Tehran’s oil industry by barring financial institutions from the U.S. market if they do business with Iran’s central bank.

China’s oil imports “have nothing to do with the nuclear issue,” a Chinese deputy foreign minister, Cui Tiankai, said Monday.

“We should not mix issues with different natures, and China’s legitimate concerns and demands should be respected,” Cui said.

Analysts in Beijing said China has no reason to go along with the sanctions. “China does not want to be seen as helping the U.S. when China’s own interest is concerned,” said Wang Lian, an Iran expert at Peking University’s School of International Relations.

He said Chinese opposition might be reinforced by Washington’s latest military strategy report published last week. It singles out Beijing as a power with the potential to affect the U.S. economy and security.

Industry analysts say that even if China agreed, it would face formidable challenges in trying to replace Iran as an oil source.

China’s fast-growing economy is the world’s biggest energy consumer and imports half its oil. Some 11 percent comes from Iran, or about 600,000 barrels per day in November, according to energy market analysts Argus Media.

Still, Geithner’s trip might not be wasted, because Washington is only starting a campaign to promote its sanctions, Peking University’s Wang said. He said China might face pressure to cooperate if other governments agree to comply.

“The U.S. is not wasting their efforts,” Wang said. “Pressuring China is what they can do, but it is fairly difficult to get China to stand on their side.”

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WINDING DOWN: After 58 years of selling music, Webster Records is pulling the plug.

The store at 117 West Lockwood Avenue in Webster Groves will shut its doors on Jan. 31, Bill Wondracek, a clerk, said today.

The store has mainly been reduced to selling rock ‘n’ roll CD’s to teens over the past few years, despite having a history of specializing in classical, jazz and pop music, much of it on vinyl, Wondracek added.

Jennifer Bellm has owned the shop for about five years. She was not available for comment.

Prior to that, it was owned by Dan Warner who sold it when he became part of the team that was involved in trying to revive the Switzer’s Licorice brand low rates payday advance.

Until the shop is shuttered, remaining inventory will be on sale, store manager Jim Lovins said in an email. Starting today it’s 30 percent off of retail and prices will be discounted through the month, he added.

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