Word: rates
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nevada's unemployment rate jumped from 0.4% to 8% in November, the highest rate since 1984, and Schwer says it could rise to 10% next year. The figure translates to more than 111,700 unemployed Nevadans, according to the state's Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation. (The national rate is 6.7%.) Meanwhile, the city's largest food bank, Three Square, which supplies food to nonprofits throughout the city, budgeted $250,000 for purchasing food in 2008. The total food need for destitute families throughout the Las Vegas Valley is closer to $1.3 million...
Over the past four years, Nevada was growing jobs at two to six times the national rate. In the past decade, the state's population increased 50%, with new residents attracted by steady employment, no personal income tax and housing that seemed to grow ever more valuable (home prices increased 135% between 2000 and 2006, according to Standard & Poor's). "We thought we had decoupled from the national economy," says Schwer. Unlike the rest of country, Nevada hadn't had a downturn since the 1980s...
...Vegas, in doubling down on the travel sector, had not diversified its economy. As the visitor rate dropped 10% in October, average daily room rates fell 14% and gaming revenue dove 26%. The hotel-casino downturn sent ripples across the city that turned into a tsunami. "In our union halls, 30% of members were what we call travelers," says Steve Holloway of the Las Vegas chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America. "They came here for the work, and now they're going home." The construction industry alone employs 10% of Las Vegas's population...
...while, it seemed China night be different. Maybe the unique factors that have allowed its economy to grow at an unprecedented rate for nearly 30 years would keep it afloat when the rest of the world was succumbing to the impact of the growing global financial crisis. But that hope has now been crushed under an increasing tide of grimmer and grimmer statistics that seem to portray an economy in free fall. China will have its hard landing in 2009, and even the most optimistic economists now concede that GDP growth will be far below the 8% annual pace that...
...there a credit crunch? Was there ever? Those questions may seem absurd. Throughout the autumn, the interest rate banks charge each other broke one record after another as trust between institutions evaporated, investors stashed so much cash in super-safe Treasuries that yields approached zero, and the private securitization market for mortgages, which keeps capital flowing for more home loans, disappeared. Lehman Brothers collapsed when no one would loan it money, and any number of other firms - AIG, Citigroup, GM - went hat in hand to the U.S. government, lender of last resort. (Read TIME's Top 10 Financial Collapses...