Word: households
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...That insecurity helps explain why Japanese consumer spending has remained stagnant. Each month in 2006, households spent less than they did in the same month in 2005. A Cabinet Office report found that household sentiment swooned in December, and Japan's top three department stores reported declining sales in the run-up to the country's New Year holiday. While unemployment has declined from 5.4% in 2002 to 4.1% at the end of 2006, wages have gone nowhere. According to statistics from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the average Japanese made $2,881 a month...
...fundamental flaw in the argument of those who believe the euro pushed up inflation significantly is that there's almost no supporting evidence. Italy provides a good example because, in 1993, it experienced a sharp deterioration in household income following a massive lira devaluation. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs, auto and retail sales crashed and there were other sizable - and measurable - effects on the economy as a whole...
...drugs and debauchery. Talented Juliet, who once dreamed of becoming a famous journalist or distinguished professor, refers to her husband as her “murderer.” Neat-freak Amanda can’t stand her children. Docile Maisie feels stifled within her husband’s household. Independent Christine hates the confinement of her house, and insecure Solly is unfulfilled by her family. See a trend?The themes of “Arlington Park”—dreams and ambitions stripped away by domesticity, spirits and personalities quailed by marriage, energy suppressed and freedom thwarted...
When the Census Bureau announced last August that northern Virginia's Loudoun County had become the nation's most affluent, with a median household income of $98,483, it was something of a shock to locals. Loudoun is far from exclusive: a third of its 255,000 residents arrived in the past half-decade. The median house sells for $440,000. These Loudounites are not trust-fund babies or Wall Street zillionaires but youngish professionals with kids to raise and mortgages...
...household in Argentina employed two immigrant domestic workers: one to cook and one to clean, a common phenomenon in Buenos Aires, where labor is cheap, especially foreign labor. My host mother happened to mention one day that she discouraged Julia, the cook, from working as many hours as Lourdes, the cleaner. Julia, a Nicaraguan who never completed high school and has difficulties understanding the thick Argentine accent, cannot read written directions and is easily confused by regional differences in Central and South American vocabulary. One night, for instance, she was sent out to the grocery store to buy palta (avocado...