Daily Roundup: Asian stocks go up, salaries go down, and small biz gets crunched
May 5th, 2008 by Ben Parr | Leave a comment on this post below!Today’s daily roundup on news involving the economic slump:
- Asian stock markets mostly climbed higher on optimism that the U.S. has dodged a full-blown recession. My issue with this Forbes article, though, is that it’s impossible to pin the rise of every Asian market to one single factor, and then to discard the fall of the Indian market. Modest gains all around, though.
- HR World reports that average salaries are dipping, some as much as $10,000 ($105k to $95k for software design, $95k to $85k for product management, etc). A lot of the blame is on the falling dollar. Of course, the dollar gets weaker with each interest rate cut.
- Morgan Stanley is going to cut 1,500 jobs, or about 5% of the firm. Morgan has fared the subprime morgage crisis better than most firms, but it’s still feeling the pinch. After all, recessions tend to hurt harder and longer in New York than the average state.
- According to 24/7 Wall Street, the credit crunch is delivering some pain to small business. 44% of small businesses used credit cards for part of their financing, and small business loans dropped 18% in the last year. Combined, that spells trouble. High interest rates and defaults of small business, the backbone of the economy, is simply not a good thing.
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