Job woes as economy dip. Jobs losses to come in Thailand?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. unemployment rate hit its highest in four years during July as employers cut jobs for a seventh straight month, though less severely than predicted, a Labor Department report showed on Friday.

The rising toll of job losses and plunging new-car sales in July fueled worry that a recession may be unavoidable and helped drive stock prices lower again.

The jobless rate climbed to 5.7 percent from 5.5 percent in June as 51,000 jobs were eliminated in July, bringing losses for the year to 463,000. Economists had expected 75,000 jobs would be cut last month but had forecast the unemployment rate would rise only to 5.6 percent.

In a separate report, the Institute for Supply Management said manufacturing activity held steady in July and noted some moderation in inflation pressures. Its index of national factory activity slipped a bit to 50 from 50.2 in June — with 50 being the dividing line between expansion and contraction.

For the full story:

Jobless rate highest in 4 years, payrolls drop – 1/08/08 – EcoDiario.es

Harder times ahead? Banks shoring up reserves sell themselves short

Merrill Has $5.7 Billion of Writedowns, Sells Shares (Update2)

By Bradley Keoun and Christine Harper
Enlarge Image/Details

July 28 (Bloomberg) — Merrill Lynch & Co. took steps to shore up its endangered credit rating by selling $8.5 billion of stock and liquidating $30.6 billion of money-losing assets at a fifth of their original value.

Temasek Holdings, the Singaporean government investment fund that bought shares in Merrill last December to become the firm’s biggest investor, will buy $3.4 billion of stock in the new offering, New York-based Merrill said today in a statement. Merrill will book a $2.5 billion expense related to the transaction as well as $5.7 billion of additional writedowns on collateralized debt obligations and associated hedges.

Merrill Chief Executive Officer John Thain is pushing to rid the firm of its CDOs, which have contributed the majority of $18.7 billion of net losses reported over the past four quarters. Thain, 53, has had to raise capital to stave off credit-ratings downgrades and demonstrate to regulators that the firm can withstand losses. Standard & Poor’s on June 2 cut Merrill’s rating to A from A+ and assigned a “negative” outlook, indicating additional downgrades were possible.

“It does mark an attempt at curing the problem but at a tremendous cost to existing shareholders,” said Charles Peabody, an analyst at Portales Partners LLC in New York who recommends selling the shares. “How can you be pleased by that? It’s a necessity.”

Merrill may sell as much as 356.5 million shares in the offering, the firm said today in a presentation for potential buyers. That represents a 36 percent increase over the number outstanding at the end of June. The price of the new shares will be set tomorrow, according to the presentation.

XL Capital

The firm has lost almost 55 percent of its market value this year. The shares fell 12 percent in New York Stock Exchange composite trading today.

The firm said it sold $30.6 billion of CDOs to an affiliate of the Dallas-based investment firm Lone Star Funds for $6.7 billion, resulting in a pretax writedown of $4.4 billion. Merrill will provide financing for about 75 percent of the purchase price, according to the statement. The sale values the CDOs at about 22 cents on the dollar.

Merrill recorded a $500 million loss related to the termination of hedging contracts on CDOs with XL Capital Assurance, and took another $800 million maximum loss related to the potential settlement of other bond-insurers.

About $7.2 billion of the remaining $8.8 billion of CDOs are hedged with “highly rated counterparties,” Merrill said.

Moody’s Investors Service affirmed Merrill’s A2 credit rating today after the securities firm announced the asset sale.

Job Cuts, Asset Sales

“Moody’s views it as a positive step in de-risking MER’s balance sheet and one that results in a significant reduction of its most problematic exposures,” the ratings company said in a statement, referring to Merrill by its stock symbol.

Money-losing collateralized debt obligations — securities packaged from other bonds, many linked to subprime mortgages — have caused Merrill’s biggest writedowns. The firm was one of the largest underwriters of CDOs before the credit crisis hit last year, and Merrill was stuck with more than $50 billion of them on its books when buyers fled the market.

Merrill on July 17 reported a second-quarter net loss of $4.65 billion, or $4.97 a share, on $9.7 billion of credit- market writedowns that totaled about $46 billion before today.

Thain cut about 4,200 jobs in the first half of the year and is selling assets to replenish the firm’s capital. Merrill completed the $4.43 billion sale of its stake in Bloomberg LP this month and said it signed a letter of intent to sell a controlling interest in Financial Data Services Inc., a mutual- fund administrator valued at $3.5 billion, to an undisclosed buyer.

Bloomberg LP is the parent of Bloomberg News.

To contact the reporter on this story: Bradley Keoun in New York at bkeoun@bloomberg.net; Christine Harper in New York at charper@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: July 28, 2008 20:10 EDT

Source: Bloomberg

Good morning Thailand: Hold onto your wallet; no VAT reduction

Update from yesterday: no VAT reduction

Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Surapong Suebwonglee on Monday ruled out the Commerce Ministry’s proposal for a value-added tax (VAT) cut to 3 per cent from 7 per cent, saying the government had implemented a number of new tax measures to help the public.

He said the government had previously decided to postpone an increase in VAT to 10 per cent from 7 per cent for another two years to help ease people’s burdens.

It had also issued measures to reduce the specific business tax for the property sector, allow a deduction for depreciation, and cut corporate taxes.

Recently, the government introduced six relief measures for six months to help ease living costs of the Thai people.

For commercial viability, he said, people in the business sector needed to learn how to control their costs efficiently.

Dr. Surapong conceded the Thai economy might continue to grow slowly in the second half of this year, but said that the slowdown would not be as severe as that in the first half of the year. (TNA)

Source : Bangkok Post

Baht Saver Magazine “Blog”

We are pleased to announce that we have updated our online magazine’s website to include a blog - not only for staff writers to complain about management’s lack of concern about the terrible working conditions, excessive overtime and bad pay – but also for …

You, our readers to give your honest feedback about our articles, typos and mistakes we make as well as general discussion about the lack of interesting articles!

To visit our blog , click here; or

Check out .. Baht Saver Free Classifieds!

Baht Saver FREE Classifieds now online!

We are pleased to announce that after a longer than anticipated period, our classifieds are now back online.

You can access Baht Saver Free Classifieds for Thailand – Bangkok and beyond here. We suggest you bookmark it.

Classifieds are good for the whole of Thailand, we are not limited to Bangkok, Pattaya or Phuket as many other services, we can cover them all.  There certainly can be an advantage to having local area classifieds, especially when they are free, so we hope our mix of local and national advertising for free will be useful to readers and fans.

For any technically inclined, the link for Baht Saver Free Classifieds is http://bahtsaver.com/blog/classified/

although we may later remove the ‘blog’ from the link, so if you are linking to us, please keep your eyes peeled.

-Update: Indeed the new link is http://bahtsaver.com/classified/