Economic Releases and Resulting Market Reactions Research Paper

Economic Releases and Resulting Market Reactions - Research Paper Example The US Economy created 113,000 jobs with unemployment rate dipping to a low of 6.6%. Despite more people gaining employment, decline in hiring rates raised concerns of a slower growth. Rather than the economy taking off, it stumbled. Federal Reserve’s much-anticipated announcement a decision to start scaling back, the monthly asset purchases in January encountered a relatively mute market reaction not just in the US but across the globe. Although US equity markets at first fell on news, markets rallied strongly for remaining part of the month coupled with economic activity improvements as well as reassurance from central bank that its major interest rate would most likely remain near zero until after unemployment in the US fell below 6.5%.Hourly wages increased by 5 cents. As a result of the changes, job changes were recorded with job growth being constrained by sharp decline in public sector. Federal government shed off more than 12,000 jobs, while states and municipalities shed off 17,000 workers. Healthcare increased only 1500 jobs. Consumer spending: consumer spending declined for a 2nd straight month signaling a slowdown in the economy. Retail sales declined 0.4% in January marking the largest drop in the last ten months. The slowing economic fortunes are likely to see further reduction in consumer spending. The Manufacturing sector experienced expansion as shown in PMI, 51.3% although this was drop by 5.2% compared to seasonally adjusted rate of 56.5% in December. However, the reading being more than 50% indicates expansion of the manufacturing sector. The number of unemployed people (10.2 million) as well as the unemployment rate (6.6 %) recorded little change in January. This is a continuous trend from October which has seen joblessness rates reducing by 0.6%. Of the major work groups 20.7% of the unemployed are teenagers, 5.7% are whites, 6.2% are adult men, 12.1% are blacks, 5.9%

Economical Events That Lead Up To The Great Depression Essay -- essays

Information: In the 1920's, things were really rocking in the US and around the world. The rapid increase in industrialization was fueling growth in the economy, and technology improvements had the leading economists believing that the up rise would continue. During this boom period, wages increased along with consumer spending, and stock prices began to rise as well. Billions of dollars were invested in the stock market as people began speculating on the rising stock prices and buying on margin. The enormous amount of unsecured consumer debt created by this speculation left the stock market essentially off-balance. Many investors, caught up in the race to make a killing, invested their life savings, mortgaged their homes, and cashed in safer investments such as treasury bonds and bank accounts. As the prices continued to rise, some economic analysts began to warn of an impending correction, but the leading pundits largely ignored them. Many banks, eager to increase their profits, began speculating dangerously with their investments as well. Finally, in October 1929, the buying craze began to dwindle, and was followed by an even wilder selling craze. The Great Depression was the worst economic slump ever in U.S. history, and one, which spread to virtually the entire industrialized world. The sock market crash was the start of an economical downturn. Numerous people bought their stocks on margin. They also purchased stock with borrowed money. When there was a drop in the st...

A Difficult Task Force: Organizational Behavior Essay

The concept of groups, teams and teamwork is a very important factor for good performance of the whole company. I read the case about the group of professionals who had to control and serve the new joint venture between companies from Japan, United States, and South America. This new company had to make, sell, and service pet caskets for the burial of beloved pets, mostly dogs and cats. During the first month of work, each company had assigned personnel to the task force. The members from every company were chosen to participate in the joint venture. As chair of the task force, Jose initiated a meeting of all the members of the new company. He gave historical information, and then he reviewed the market for the innovations of their prospective product. The task force was to develop the initial design parameters for the new product to meet increasing demand around the world. Next part of the meeting was opened to comments and suggestions. Mariana Preus, representative from Argentina, the head of product design, said that the current designs that they had in production in Argentina plant were just fine, and he didn’t see any reasons to innovate the design of their product. All other members of the meeting agreed not to make any changes in the design of the product. Jose reminded to all of the participants of the meeting that their task force’s purpose is to redesign the product and its manufacturing systems. Finally, Jose had to agree with members of the meeting and to write a memo to the council of presidents with the recommendation to use existing designs and to begin immediately to design the plant and the manufacturing system. The meeting adjourned,d and Jose returned to his computer and started to write the memo that, he knew, would anger the presidents. He wondered what had he done wrong and what he could have done to prevent such result of the meeting. I think that in this case study we see an example of the formal group that is formed by a manager to help the organization to accomplish its goals. The group development process wasn’t finished and ended on the second stage–storming. Analyzing the group member roles, in our situation Jose is the initiator of the meeting, information giver, opinion seeker, and orienter. Mariana Preus has a role of initiator and information giver, because he insisted on the not redesigning of the product. The other members seem to serve just as a passive audience–followers, because they all agreed  to the Mariana’s suggestion, and didn’t give any other opinions. Also, there was no group cohesiveness; a â€Å"we feeling† binding group members together to accomplish their goal. The diverse nature of the group affected the committee’s action by not understanding and participating of all members in the meeting. If I was in Jose’s position, I would try to keep the group headed toward the stated goal better, and not to agree with the suggestion of one member, but to count the opinions of every member of the group. Also, it wasn’t right to adjourn the meeting before getting the result that would approach to the goal of the whole meeting.

Using Ruby Environmental Variables

Environment variables are variables passed to programs by the command line or the graphical shell. When an environment variable is referred to, its value (whatever the variable is defined as) is then referenced. Though there are a number of environment variables that only affect the command line or graphical shell itself (such as PATH or HOME), there are also several that directly affect how Ruby scripts execute. Tip:  Ruby environment variables are similar to ones found in the Windows OS. For example, Windows users may be familiar with a TMP  user variable to define the location of the temporary folder the for the currently logged in user. Accessing Environment Variables from Ruby Ruby has direct access to environment variables via the ENV hash. Environment variables can be directly read or written to by using the index operator with a string argument. Note that writing to environment variables will only have an effect on child processes of the Ruby script. Other invocations of the script will not see the changes in environment variables. #!/usr/bin/env ruby# Print some variablesputs ENV[PATH]puts ENV[EDITOR]# Change a variable then launch a new programENV[EDITOR] geditcheat environment_variables --add Passing Environment Variables to Ruby To pass environment variables to Ruby, simply set that environment variable in the shell. This varies slightly between operating systems, but the concepts remain the same. To set an environment variable on the Windows command prompt, use the set command. set TESTvalue To set an environment variable on Linux  or OS X, use the export command. Though  environment variables are a normal part of the Bash shell, only variables that have been exported will be available in programs launched by the Bash shell. $ export TESTvalue Alternatively, if the environment variable will only be used by the program about to be run, you can define any environment variables before the name of the command. The environment variable will be passed onto the program as its run, but not saved. Any further invocations of the program will not have this environment variable set. $ EDITORgedit cheat environment_variables --add Environment Variables Used by Ruby There are a number of environment variables that affect how the Ruby interpreter acts. RUBYOPT - Any command-line switches here will be added to any switches specified on the command line.RUBYPATH - When used with the -S switch on the command line, the paths listed in RUBYPATH will be added to the paths searched when looking for Ruby scripts. The paths in RUBYPATH precede the paths listed in PATH.RUBYLIB - The list of paths here will be added to the list of paths Ruby uses to search for libraries included in the program with the require method. The paths in RUBYLIB will be searched before other directories.