1 in 10 Unemployed Denied Jobs Due to Credit Checks

Employer credit checks are preventing the nation's hardest hit job seekers from entering the workforce, a new study shows.

One in four unemployed Americans have been required to go through a credit check when applying for a job, and one in ten have been denied jobs due to information in their credit report, according to a survey by liberal think-tank Demos of about 1,000 low- and middle-income households with credit card debt.

"Employer credit checks are common and they're keeping people from getting jobs," said Amy Traub, Demos senior policy analyst and author of the report.

While people tend to think credit checks are only conducted for senior level positions, the study found they are often used for entry-level, low-paying positions as well -- even for jobs like delivery drivers and frozen yogurt servers.

Bad credit is often a result of unemployment and the loss of health insurance, which makes it difficult for people to keep up with the bills, Demos found. Another common cause of poor credit is medical debt, which only gets harder to manage when compounded by unemployment. Read more >>

Most Americans Are Flat Broke

Most Americans don't have nearly enough money stashed away for emergencies and more than one-in-four don't even have a single penny saved. While the general rule of thumb is to have an emergency fund that will cover at least six months of expenses, only 25% of Americans have that amount saved, research released Monday by Bankrate.com finds.

About 49% of Americans don't even have enough money saved to cover three months of expenses -- slightly worse than the 46% of Americans who reported having less than three months worth of savings last year. And 28% don't have any cushion whatsoever -- up from 24% last year, according to the report, which was based on a survey of 1,000 adults. "Incomes are largely stagnant, so it's difficult for people to make significant headway on savings when household expenses are creeping higher but incomes are not," said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst for Bankrate.com.

"Prolonged unemployment has also depleted the savings of many people who at one time had a more appropriate cushion." Read more >>

Student Loans: The Next Bailout?

Here’s what we do know about student loan debt: it’s roughly $1 trillion in size, greater than either auto or credit-card debt and second only to mortgage debt in the U.S.

Borrowers in their 30s today owe $28,500, on average. The debt burden has soared just as — and partly because — the recession hit, so younger graduates carrying the highest balances are hit with the double whammy of a weak job market (that still isn’t showing any sign of rapid improvement).

And this all comes as globalization and technological change have upended once-reliable career paths, wiped out many mid-level professional jobs and leave low-paying fields in health, food and beverage services, and retail as among the fastest growing job markets over the next decade. More...

Consumer Confidence: Into the Death Zone

abcnews.com

Consumer confidence matched its low for the year this week, with the ABC News Consumer Comfort Index extending a steep 9-point, six-week drop from what had been its 2010 high.

The weekly index, based on Americans’ views of the national economy, the buying climate and their personal finances, stands at -50 on its scale of +100 to -100, just 4 points from its lowest on record in nearly 25 years of weekly polls, set in December 2008 and January 2009.

Underscoring its current deep weakness, the CCI has been -50 or lower just 27 times in 1,284 weekly polls – all but one of them since August 2008. (The other, February 1992.) It's in effect the death zone for consumer sentiment.

The CCI has been this low twice previously this year, in February and April, then advanced through late June before turning back down. Compare -50 to its 24-year average, -13.

The index's recent trend anticipated the latest data from the U.S. Department of Commerce, which today reported that personal expenditures and personal incomes alike were flat in June, the first time personal incomes hadn’t risen month-to-month in nearly a year. Like the CCI, these data signal the economy’s continued struggles and, with 9.5 percent unemployment, the pernicious effect of a jobs market that’s been so weak for so long.

Among the CCI’s individual measures, 92 percent of Americans now say the national economy is in bad shape, the most since mid-April; 76 percent call it a bad time to spend money, the most since early May; and 57 percent say their own finances are hurting.

Ratings of the economy overall are a dramatic 29 points worse than their long-term average. Ratings of the buying climate are 13 points worse, as are ratings personal finances. Majorities have rated their own finances negatively every week of 2010, save the first week of the year.

Click here for tables with this week’s CCI data.

Gallup Polling Paints Much Bleaker Economic Outlook Picture Than UMichigan

Even as the increasingly more unreliable UMichigan consumer confidence index surged more than expected in June, to the highest reading in two years, in yet another doctored attempt to stimulate consumers to buy assorted trinkets they don't need and max out their credit cards, a comparable, and traditionally much more comprehensive Gallup polls, paints a vastly different picture. As the chart below demonstrates, the spread between those who see the economy as getting better (32%) and worse (63%) has hit 31, and is threatening to break out the highest reading recorded in the past year. It is no surprise that with nobody trading at all, US stocks are back to their old trickey of spiking ever higher on no volume and on increasingly worse news out of Europe, and not to mention on an atrocious NFP and retail saels report for May, both of which are now promptly forgotten. More...

Bailouts, stimulus packages, debt piled upon debt, where will it all end?

How did we get into a situation where there has never been more material wealth & productivity and yet everyone is in debt to bankers? And now, all of a sudden, the bankers have no money and we the taxpayers, have to rescue them by going even further into debt! Money as Debt II Explores the baffling, fraudulent and destructive arithmetic of the money system that holds us hostage to a forever growing DEBT...and how we might evolve beyond it into a new era.

Man Shuns Recession - Lives in Cave

Christopher Ketcham; Photograph by Mark Heithoff

DANIEL SUELO LIVES IN A CAVE. UNLIKE THE average American—wallowing in credit-card debt, clinging to a mortgage, terrified of the next downsizing at the office—he isn't worried about the economic crisis. That's because he figured out that the best way to stay solvent is to never be solvent in the first place. Nine years ago, in the autumn of 2000, Suelo decided to stop using money. He just quit it, like a bad drug habit.

His dwelling, hidden high in a canyon lined with waterfalls, is an hour by foot from the desert town of Moab, Utah, where people who know him are of two minds: He's either a latter-day prophet or an irredeemable hobo. Suelo's blog, which he maintains free at the Moab Public Library, suggests that he's both. "When I lived with money, I was always lacking," he writes. "Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present." More...