Word: downturning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Staffers in the industry at the heart of the nation's economic woes have been hurt less in the downturn than the rest of the country has. Jobs in the banking and insurance industries have fallen just 5% since the start of the recession. That's half a percentage point less than the 5.4% overall drop in nongovernment employment over the same time period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). And it is far less than the pain experienced by workers in other sectors of the economy...
...sure, the financial-services business is not immune to the downturn. Many bankers have lost their jobs as their firms have faced steep losses from bad loans or just gone out of business. There are 296,500 fewer people working in banking and insurance than there were at the start of the recession, according to the BLS. And financial-services workers have been hit far harder in this recession than in past ones. In the 2001 downturn, employment in the banking and insurance sectors actually rose 1%. Finance-industry jobs did fall in the early-'90s recession, but just...
...that shift hasn't happened. At the end of May, just over 7% of the nation's workforce was employed in the financial-services business, unchanged from December 2007, when the downturn started. In all, the government said the economy lost 345,000 jobs in May - a significant improvement from April, when employment fell by just over 500,000. The banking and insurance businesses, though, accounted for only about 5% of May's losses, or 19,500 jobs...
What's going on here? Economists say that even in this downturn, financial services has proven to be more recession-proof than other lines of work. Consumers can put off buying a new car or going on vacation. But most people will still continue to pay their mortgage, write checks and deposit money at the bank. "The fact that the financial-services industry is declining this much is startling," says Joel Prakken of research firm Macroeconomic Advisers, which puts together ADP's employment report...
...also victims of the technical and consensual nature of the E.U. itself. Voters are turned off by the process-heavy, nonadversarial way in which the Parliament operates: there is little difference among the policies proposed by the three biggest groups, the conservatives, liberals and socialists. In the current downturn, they are all seen as having fallen asleep at the wheel while the economy went sour...