Word: forecasters
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...that activity reflects the grim prospects facing the industry next year. IATA expects the world's airlines to lose an additional $2.5 billion in 2009. Passenger traffic, it forecasts, will slide 3%, the first fall since 2001. Next year looks particularly bleak for European carriers. Having hedged more than U.S. rivals against the spiraling fuel costs earlier this year, European airlines - now locked in to fuel contracts - are less able to benefit from the steep slide in the price of oil in recent weeks. American carriers have also reacted quicker than European rivals when it comes to cutting back...
...hiring machine, however, hasn't shut down altogether. The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits may have hit a 26-year high, but there are still lots of jobs open, because no matter how grim the economic forecast, at least some workers will change jobs voluntarily or retire. "Companies may not be making expansionary or discretionary hires," says Marc Cenedella, founder of TheLadders.com a subscription service that lists only jobs that pay $100,000 and up. "But even in a downturn, there's still 20% to 25% natural turnover per year." In the six-figure category, he estimates that...
...rising costs for health care and education on one side and falling revenue on the other. According to a November survey of legislative fiscal officers included in the report, 18 states are seeing personal income tax come in below target, 26 states are watching sales tax fall below forecast, and 21 states are finding corporate income taxes to be less than what they expected. "State lawmakers knew that revenue growth was slowing, but no one could have foreseen just how dramatically the situation would change in a few short months," the report notes...
...Toyota, the industry behemoth, just recorded its seventh consecutive month of declining sales, and the company's second-quarter net profit plunged nearly 70%. Toyota has cut its earnings forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2009 to $6 billion, which is just one-third the profit it made the previous year. "You are looking at the deepest downturn that Japanese automakers have ever seen," says Chris Richter, senior research analyst at CLSA, a Hong Kong-based brokerage house. "They've faced downturns before, but not downturns in virtually every global market simultaneously. Even Honda Civics and Toyota Priuses aren...
Lindsay's forecast is nowhere as dire as Chowdhry's. But both analysts are reacting to reports that the cost-per-click for Internet ads has fallen an estimated 20% this year. Google and other Internet-advertising companies make much of their money by serving up ads that match keywords that people type into search engines. The rates for those ads are determined by advertisers, who bid for top placement. But advertisers have begun lowering their bids because they aren't getting the returns (also known as conversion rates) that they expected. In late November, research firm eMarketer lowered...