Today’s Occupy Wall Street protests in Portland, Oregon shut down two terminals at the city’s port, which led workers to miss a day of work. But, is this benefiting the 99 percent or the one percent?

Kari Koch, part of Occupy Portland, joined Your World to explain the group’s position – that the wealth being created at these ports is not going into the 99 percent’s checking accounts. “We are disrupting the one percent and their capacity to make money today,” she said.

Neil educated the simpleton, saying that all of the 23 shippers that were affected by their actions today largely have nothing to do with the brokerage firms Portland targeted by shutting down the terminals.

This is a topic I have been passionately observing over the last two years. As a family of Spaniards and Finnish in our household … we look with concern at the effects across the pond and within our backyards. Ignore the issue at your peril. The economic winds of unsustainable debt are blowing.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: euro is ‘unsaveable’
Telegraph columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard tells Robert Miller why the single currency cannot work in its current form, and what he believes will happen to the eurozone next.

Engineering undergraduates demand work experience

A common refrain from Graduates seeking careers in Engineering? “It’s not fair!”

Engineering undergraduates demand more work experience, graduate schemes and graduate training, however throughout Europe and The United States, the opportunity to gain work experience through graduate jobs, i.e. internships has contracted along a similar trajectory as experienced, senior level, full-time openings.

A thousand engineering undergraduates from the UK’s top universities were surveyed recently by the leading graduate jobs site, TARGETjobsengineering.co.uk, and their No 1 problem with employers was the lack of work experience available to them.

The survey results were revealed at the annual TARGETjobs Engineering Forum, held at Imperial College on 28 July and attended by regular engineering employers like BP, Rolls-Royce, EDF Energy, Unilever and E.ON.

In a difficult job market, the engineering students surveyed felt that the glaring lack of work experience opportunities made it much more difficult to get a job interview or offer in their final year. They did all the right things by attending campus presentations and careers fairs but when it came to the crunch, they felt that employers favored students who had substantial relevant work experience. Many pointed out the irony of the situation where they were encouraged to get work experience by the same organizations who didn’t actually offer it to them.

A mechanical engineering student from Imperial College said:

Graduates need a chance to gain experience although they are being asked to have experience before they’re considered for a job. This isn’t fair.

And an electrical engineering student from Loughborough said:

Most students have no experience but most of the jobs ask for experience. It’s completely unfair and pushes a lot of people out of the engineering market.

This student’s fears are confirmed elsewhere in the survey, where 90 per cent of respondents said they knew other students who were actively considering working outside engineering after graduation – usually in the City where banks value the analytical skills of engineers. With the country’s focus on regeneration of the manufacturing sector, this is could have a negative effect on growth.

Students also called for more employers on campus and more direct involvement by employers in coursework. They are desperately serious about becoming more-rounded engineers but they want a level playing field and the chance to prove their worth.

Chris Phillips, Publishing Director at GTI Media and Chair of the TARGETjobs Engineering Forum, said:

I have never experienced such a consistent response from a student survey before. The majority of respondents were amazed and appalled at the lack of work experience being offered and the insistence by some employers that experience was a pre-requisite for applicants. The situation is improving, however, and most of the employers attending the Forum had already committed to extending their placement programmes.

• The surveys were live for six weeks from the beginning of June.
• There were 944 respondents to the student survey and 342 respondents to the recent graduate survey.
• TARGETjobs.co.uk is the leading graduate jobsite in the country, which contains over 500 graduate employer profiles and over 20,000 articles offering careers advice.
• It is published by GTI Media, the largest graduate careers media group in the world, which was founded in 1988 and currently employs 250 people across nine countries.
• GTI Media also produces a wide range of sector-specific publications, both in print and online, written by experts in their sectors helping graduates secure jobs.
• GTI Media distributes its products to universities across the UK and Ireland and is the publishing partner of 25 leading university careers services including London, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Edinburgh, Warwick, Manchester, Nottingham, Durham and Trinity College Dublin.
• GTI is also the official publishing partner of the Association of Higher Education Careers Services, the professional association of careers services in Ireland, producing products under the gradireland brand.
• For more information on GTI Media visit http://gtimedia.co.uk

The anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street protesters had the nerve to ask James for investment capital. They wanted funding for the “Constitutional World Federation” they are planning.

Another protester goes into detail about how Almagamated Bank is funding the Occupy Wall Street anti-banker protests. They’re all for capitalism, but only if it benefits them.

James O’Keefe scores another win against hypocrisy.

As history often proves there will always be the those who ate from the tree to protest the seeds they planted …

Double-Dip Recession a Foregone Conclusion: Roubini

Wall Street Journal Opinion Page

Yesterday’s September jobs report was a welcome surprise, a signal that another recession may be averted. With 103,000 new jobs in the month and an upward revision of 99,000 for July and August, the jobs picture looks less bleak than it did a month ago. More Americans also started looking for work and the labor force expanded by 423,000, according to the Labor Department’s household survey.
Related Video

Steve Moore on the jobs report. Plus, studies show more Americans receiving government benefits and paying no federal income tax.

However, the unemployment rate held steady at 9.1%, some 6.2 million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months, and the economy is producing far fewer jobs than you’d expect in a typical recovery from recession. Over the past six months the U.S. economy has created an average of 72,000 jobs a month, roughly half the pace needed to chip away at the jobless rate. The hardest hit have been minority workers, with the jobless rate for blacks still 16%, Hispanics 11.3%, and teens 24.6%.

As it happens, the biggest one-month jobs gain in American history was at exactly this juncture of the Reagan Presidency, after another deep recession. In September 1983, coming out of the 1981-82 downturn, American employers added 1.1 million workers to their payrolls, the acceleration point for a seven-year expansion that created some 17 million new jobs.

The difference between then and now isn’t the magnitude of the recessions but the policies the U.S. pursued to restore growth. In the Reagan expansion, spending and tax rates were cut, regulations were eased, and government was in retreat. Today, we’ve had a spending and regulatory boom, the threat of higher tax rates, and a general antibusiness political climate. Policies have consequences.

“Why wouldn’t an investor buy Canada with a better balance sheet or Australia with a better balance sheet with interest rates at 1 or 2 or 3 percent higher?” he said. “It simply doesn’t make any sense.”

Reflecting increasing concern from the financial community over whether the US is capable of a political solution to its burgeoning debt and deficit problems, PIMCO’s CEO Bill Gross made some startling observations:

“When adding in all of the money owed to cover future liabilities in entitlement programs the US is actually in worse financial shape than Greece and other debt-laden European countries, Pimco’s Bill Gross told CNBC Monday.

Much of the public focus is on the nation’s public debt, which is $14.3 trillion. But that doesn’t include money guaranteed for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which comes to close to $50 trillion, according to government figures.

The government also is on the hook for other debts such as the programs related to the bailout of the financial system following the crisis of 2008 and 2009, government figures show.

Taken together, Gross puts the total at “nearly $100 trillion,” that while perhaps a bit on the high side, places the country in a highly unenviable fiscal position that he said won’t find a solution overnight.

“We’ve always wondered who will buy Treasurys” after the Federal Reserve purchases the last of its $600 billion to end the second leg of its quantitative easing program later this month, Gross said. “It’s certainly not Pimco and it’s probably not the bond funds of the world.”

Pimco, based in Newport Beach, Calif., manages more than $1.2 trillion in assets and runs the largest bond fund in the world.

Gross confirmed a report Friday that Pimco has marginally increased its Treasurys allotment—from 4 percent to 5 percent—but still has little interest in US debt and its low yields that are in place despite an ugly national balance sheet.

“Why wouldn’t an investor buy Canada with a better balance sheet or Australia with a better balance sheet with interest rates at 1 or 2 or 3 percent higher?” he said. “It simply doesn’t make any sense.”

For those wondering why this is news, this is the one man who left Obama speechless and was universally praised and many argued, upstaged the President during his Healthcare summit.

I would respectfully submit that, unscripted and off the cuff, Ryan is the greatest speaker and policy wonk since Lincoln. Bold statement? Watch.