New Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Development
New Hampshire's Business Development Manager Michael Bergeron was recently characterized as a business thief by The Boston Globe.
With the imminent closure of the Balsams Grand Resort in Dixville Notch, the issue of economic development in the North Country is once again on the state’s radar screen. The pulp mill industry is all but dead, along with a proposed large-scale biofuel plant. These complications mean that when the Balsams shutters next month, the loss of 300 jobs will hurt a depressed area even more. I recently talked with New Hampshire’s Business Development Manager, Michael Bergeron. Last month, Bergeron was profiled in The Boston Globe as a business thief, sneaking across the southern border to steal Massachusetts-based firms. Now, he tells State Impact the challenges he faces bringing outside businesses to the state in general, and the North Country in particular.
The New Hampshire Business Review has an interesting roundup of new state laws that went into effect last weekend. The main piece of legislation, Senate Bill 86, allows employers to get a warning for violating labor laws before the Department of Labor lays down a fine. But, there are definitely exceptions, as the NHBR notes:
J. Shephen Conn / Flickr
New labor laws went into effect last weekend. Among other things, businesses can now get warnings for violating most labor laws before getting fined by the Department of Labor.
Failure to pay workers full and on time
• Paychecks on a bank not convenient to the job site
• Failure to pay the last paycheck in full
• Failure to withhold wages for child support
• Deducting wages for insurance benefits when the policy has been canceled
• Holding wages to make up for worker’s actions that caused loss or damage
• Not complying with illegal immigrant laws
• Threatening to fire workers, unless they break the law
Oh yes, the Labor Department can also skip the warning if the employer ‘intends to cause harm” or if the violation “poses a threat to public safety.'”
Other new laws going into effect governed stormwater permits, fees for trailer park residents, and wine festivals.
Credit card delinquency rates are down, but it's a mixed bag when you take consumer debt into account.
“The national credit card delinquency rate, or rate of payments 90 days or more past due, fell to 0.60 percent in the second quarter, down from 0.92 percent a year ago. That’s the lowest rate since 1994, according to credit reporting agency TransUnion.
Delinquencies were expected to drop, but the improvement in that April to June period was faster than forecast.”
As for the cause of this rapid improvement, the piece cites people carrying fewer credit cards, banks maintaining stricter standards on credit card approval, and lower credit limits. Even though this is good news, however, the country’s consumer debt situation still isn’t great,
“TransUnion also saw higher card use, reflected in a slight uptick in the amount of debt card users carried during the quarter. The average combined total debt for all major credit cards increased by $20 from the first three months of the year, to $4,699 per borrower. Even so, that amount is down more than 5 percent from the $4,951 average in the second quarter of 2010, and is 16 percent lower than the peak average debt of $5,575 in the first quarter of 2009.”
Michael McCord of the New Hampshire Business Review provides a good synopsis of why ten hospital administrators are so upset about the latest state budget that they’ve filed a lawsuit. Continue Reading →
All over the country, homebuilders face stiff competition from banks trying to quickly unload foreclosed homes.
“The National Association of Home Builders said Monday that its index of builder sentiment in August was unchanged at 15. The index has been below 20 for all but one month during the past two years.
Any reading below 50 indicates negative sentiment about the housing market. It hasn’t reached 50 since April 2006, the peak of the housing boom…
Toward the end of the piece, Kravitz writes,
“A special question on the survey this month showed that 41 percent of builders had lost a contract because a buyer could not sell their current home, said Bob Nielsen, chairman of the builders’ group.”
Among other issues homebuilders face are bargain basement prices on foreclosed homes and customers who can’t get loans from banks or a large enough downpayment scraped together.
State Impact recently looked at how the housing market, banks, and businesses are affected by recent events on Wall Street and in Washington. You can check it out here.
At this point, the national unemployment rate is 9.1 percent, while in New Hampshire it's much lower, at 4.9 percent. Small business hiring is considered key to speeding-up the nation's economic recovery.
“The percentage of small-business owners feeling optimistic about the economy fell from 67 percent in a June survey, to 47 percent in July Continue Reading →
After Labor Day, could we see the triumphant return of gas prices below $3.50?
“The cost of a barrel of crude was $81 on Wednesday, about a 20 percent decrease from a couple of months ago. The fall in price is due in large part to global economic uncertainty stemming in part from the U.S. credit downgrade.
But Dr. Massood Samii, chair of the international business department at Southern New Hampshire University, said, ‘I don’t expect it to go much further down. Barring any major political upheaval, $80 to $90 seems to be a reasonable target, and that should lead to some decline in gasoline prices.'”
So why wouldn’t we see a proportionate decline in gas prices as the price of crude goes down?
“The cost of crude oil accounts for about one-third of the cost of gasoline at the pump, he said. The other two-thirds are a combination of factors – taxes, transportation and refinery costs, and profits taken at every step of the value chain, from wholesaler to distributor to gas station.
For the most part, those costs are fixed, so a decline in the price of crude oil only decreases the price of gas by a fraction.
In fact, by the time gasoline arrives at the gas station, wholesalers pretty much dictate the price that retailers charge, he said. Most gas stations make only a ‘minimal’ profit margin – a few cents on each gallon sold, he said.”
The NHBR also quotes Samii as saying we’ll probably see gas prices in New Hampshire fall below $3.50 sometime after Labor Day, when summer winds-down and people start to lay off the heavy-duty driving.
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, with financial tremors continuing to shake-up the jagged economic landscape. National GDP barely went up, Congress made an 11th hour deal to raise the debt ceiling, S&P downgraded the US credit rating anyway, and the Federal Reserve decided to hold interest rates steady—at virtually nothing—for the next two years.
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