PODCAST: Crude oil and consumer prices rise, one job where women make more
PODCAST: Crude oil and consumer prices rise, one job where women make more
The betting of experts was consumer sentiment would go up. Maybe the experts hadn’t filled their gas tanks lately. There’s news consumer sentiment slipped in the early part of the month. Thompson Reuters/University of Michigan puts much of the blame on fuel prices.
After a breather Thursday, crude oil prices are back up this morning by about 0.8 percent.
There is one job category where women do earn more than men. Bloomberg News combed through census numbers and found when it comes to personal care and service workers — including housesitters, shoe-shiners, and personal valets — women make a $1.01 for every dollar a man makes. And they had to really do some combing to tease out that example because it was the only one of 265 job categories where women were ahead.
And New York’s mayor has weighed in on — dare we call it — Muppet-Gate. It’s the flap triggered by the blistering article about Goldman Sachs writen by a former employee to explain why he quit. Greg Smith believes Goldman exploits its clients and calls them muppets. Today on his radio show, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said all the attention to this is, quote, “ridiculous.” He said people should keep in mind that most of Goldman’s clients are sophisticated corporations and institutuional investors. He didn’t mention they pay taxes in city of New York.
Factory output was up point 3 percent last month, but mining activity dropped, so overall industrial production was flat.
Being the son of a dictator had its privileges. The Financial Times reports that passenger ship operator MSC cruises has stepped in to buy a massive ship that was under contruction for Hannibal Gaddafi, the son of the late Libyan leader. It was going to be cool, with a 120 ton tank of seawater to hold six live sharks of the sort you might use to menace, say, James Bond. Now that the Gaddafis are out, the order was canceled. The new buyer didn’t want the shark tank, so gone is that design element.
Boston had a big power outage the other day. They’re calling it the back bay blackout. Well it probably wasn’t much fun for the people of Boston, but it appears it was a bonanza for the animals at a local zoo. According to the Boston Herald, The Capital Grille steakhouse had to get rid of 2,500 pounds of meat. And the lucky recipients were the lions, tigers and leopards at the Southwick Zoo, who apparently scarfed down porterhouse and rib eye — bones and all.
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