Labor

Authored by Patrick Watson via Mauldin Economics,

Wall Street endlessly gushes about retirement. Its TV commercials show how wonderful life will be in our golden years—when we are old, yet still healthy and wealthy enough to go hang-gliding every day.

Meanwhile, out here in the real world, most working-age Americans don’t want to talk or even think about retirement. Often this is because they know they aren't saving enough and probably will have to work until they drop dead.

One month after Tesla lost its head of business development who wished to "spend more time with his family", and just weeks after the EV company's veteran battery technology director also unexpectedly quit amid a growing senior management exodus (full list at the bottom of this article), Tesla decided to even out the ranks on the bottom as well, and fired "hundreds of workers" this week, including engineers, managers and factory workers even as the company struggles to expand its manufacturing and product line, according to the Mercury News which first repo

After two consecutive months of record high job openings, today's August JOLTS report  - Janet Yellen's favorite labor market indicator - showed a modest pullback across most categories, with the total number of job openings falling in august from 6.140MM to 6.082MM, below the 6.125MM consensus estimate, resulting in an unchanged Oct. job opening rate of 4%.

We spend fair amount of time discussing the soaring costs of Obamacare, but, as the Kaiser Family Foundation points out in a new study, employer sponsored plans, while not as bad as Obamacare, are also gradually pushing more healthcare costs onto their employees through surging deductibles and co-insurance payments all while wages remain fairly stagnant.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/p0Q3nhfHcY0

The White House has rolled out the President’s 70 point plan to reform the immigration system. Will building a wall, hiring more officers and prosecutors, mandating E-Verify, and other enforcement measures help solve the problem? Or is there a better way?