The picture above is one of the pictures I took at the Southwest HQ (click to see a bigger version). EVERY hallway there is filled with pictures of their people. It’s not the pictures on the wall that make the culture strong. The culture is strong because they go to great lengths to hire people who “belong.” They go out of their way to care about their employees as human beings. The pictures on the wall are just one of the things they do to prove how much they love their people.

How to know if a company really wants to understand and satisfy what their customers want? I read a blog about a man’s recent visit to the Southwest Airline corporate headquarters in Dallas. He deeply believes that if a company cares about their employees very much, they would love their customers too. Also, he believe that a company which workers are glad and prefer to work for, would be a ideal choice to do business with too.

 In my opinion, nearly every single company on the planet will tell people how much they care about their customers, whatever they have done is for their customer. Is that really the truth? I don’t think so. I consider that what most companies care is the benefit, the business, and the money. They speak to the public about their concern for their customers, but what they think about is how much money they can make. If a company really care about people, they will treat their employees well too.

Finally, the U.S. labor market has some concrete job growth. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistic, there is 162,000 new jobs in American in March. However, this number is still insufficient compare with consensus expectations, which predicted about 190,000 more jobs. Even though employers added a significant amount of jobs to their payrolls last month, the growth wasn’t robust enough to lower the unemployment rate, which was unchanged at 9.7%, as economists had expected.

The fact that the unemployment rate stayed at the elevated level of 9.7% likely signals that the job growth wasn’t enough to offset a flood of unemployed workers from returning to the job market. An estimated 3 million workers quit searching for jobs altogether during the downturn. 

More robust job growth will be needed to recapture the millions of jobs that were slashed during the recession as companies cut costs to deal with falling demand. However, March’s employment figures did exceed the 120,000 jobs that must be created just to keep up with population growth. 

Reference link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36146930/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/

Following the last pot topic, what conclusions do Mr. Hunt finds in the crisis study? Their findings have relevance to current policy debates in Washington, Rogoff adds, and they have examined crises in 66 countries for their book.

Once debt becomes excessive, countries must go through time-consuming and often painful debt repayment and increased saving. They can’t merely grow out of the problem. With excessive debt, it’s not critical whether it’s owed to other nations or owed internally. Extreme debt damages not just total output, but also labor markets and prices of assets, such as financial investments.

Some countries have dealt with debt overhangs by inflating their currency. In the US, Hunt sees deflation as the greater risk currently. Employing those who are out of work and fully utilizing our resources will be a slow process. He sees stimulus plans as possibly a “transitory benefit,” but not for long. They just pile up debt.

What should we learn from the past 800 year? A recently publish book can tell us something, it suggests that the United States and other countries will emerge only slowly from what is often dubbed the“great recession.” The author of the book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Kenneth Rogoff, is a Harvard economist and author who has also published extensively on policy issues in international finance. He suggests in this book that the stock market will take two to three to get back to its peak before the crisis, and employment will need more than four years to creep back. Moreover, House prices will need seven to 10 years to return to their earlier level.

Over the past two centuries, financial crises have been followed within two or three years by a wave of sovereign debt crises, often bond defaults. Nations have piled up too much debt and have trouble paying back their bondholders.

This is the recent papers from Kenneth:

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/rogoff/Recent_Papers_Rogoff

Reference link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rogoff

What is the big matters that attract international attention recently? It’s the debt crisis in Greece which means Greece is paying the price for past fiscal irresponsibility. Anxious investors have driven interest rates on Greek government bonds extremely high as well as risen the country’s borrowing costs. This will push Greece even deeper into debt. As a matter of fact, Greece’s public debt, at 113 percent of G.D.P., is indeed high, but other countries have dealt with similar levels of debt without crisis. American had federal debt which equal to 122%of G.D.P. in 1946 cause the United States was just walk away from World War II. Debt as a percentage of G.D.P. continuously falls in the decades that followed, hitting a low of 33 percent in 1981. The rise in G.D.P. in dollar terms was almost equally the result of economic growth and inflation, with both real G.D.P. and the overall level of prices rising about 40 percent from 1946 to 1956. Unfortunately, Greece can’t expect a similar performance. So the only way Greece could tame its debt problem would be with savage spending cuts and tax increases, measures that would themselves worsen the unemployment rate

Reference linl:http://www.feedcry.com/archive/aid/646236