QUOTE OF THE DAY
Chicago Tribune: Waukegan teachers ratify tentative contract
Waukegan school district officials and teachers union representative reached a tentative agreement on a three-year contract shortly before midnight Wednesday.
The teachers union members ratified the tentative deal Thursday afternoon with 86 percent of teachers voting in favor. Slightly over 1,000 votes were cast among the Waukegan Teachers’ Council’s 1,200 members.
Schools will remain closed Friday, as both parties review the agreement, according to a joint statement. If the contract is ratified, teachers will return to work Friday with schools reopening Monday.
Reuters: Dollar surges as Fed ends QE on hawkish note
The dollar surged to a three-week high and government bond yields rose on Thursday, one day after the U.S. Federal Reserve took a more hawkish tone in its assessment of the economy as it announced the end of its six-year bond-buying program.
Global equity markets rose, led by a late-day surge on Wall Street, following the release of surprisingly strong third-quarter economic growth in the United States.
The Fed’s decision to halt new purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities had been expected. But investors were somewhat surprised by the central bank’s expression of confidence in the U.S. recovery, despite global growth concerns. The policy statement prompted markets to rethink the growing consensus that the Fed’s first interest-rate hike would not be until late in 2015.
Jon Stewart realized that Koch Industries (of David and Charles Koch fame/infamy) had been running ads during the Daily Show, and, unsurprisingly, decided to address it. The ad isn’t political, it highlights the company’s work and the people working there. Many wondered if the ads were designed to counter negative reactions to the Kochs’ political activity when they debuted in June. An executive at Koch Industries denied that in a Washington Post story last month.
Holden disputed that notion, saying the ads are aimed at spotlighting jobs available because of Koch’s continued growth. “We have not been impacted by the political attacks in our recruiting, hiring or retention, nor have our businesses been impacted,” he said.
Where the toll has been felt, Holden said, is personally by the Kochs, who have faced harassment from opponents, including death threats.
Chicago Sun Times: Refund those unfair yellow-light tickets
Chicago is on solid legal ground in hanging onto $7.7 million raked in by ticketing people who drove through shorter-than-advertised yellow lights. We can’t really disagree.
And the city is on firm ground with the experts when it says the tenth-of-a-second shorter yellow — 2.9 seconds instead of 3 — is generally sufficient time for motorists going the speed limit to come to a safe stop.
But here’s the point City Hall is ignoring completely as it happily pulls in those millions of dollars in fine: Huge numbers of Chicagoans don’t trust the fairness of the city’s entire red-light camera program, even if it helps make our streets safer. They believe City Hall’s real agenda is to raise money. And the city doesn’t do much to dispel such notions when it refuses to refund money from tickets issued this year when a yellow changed to red in less than three seconds, the city’s own announced standard. Even if we’re talking a tenth of a second.
Chicago Sun Times: Let’s not oversell CTA terrorist screenings
Let’s say you’re a terrorist. You’ve got a bomb in your backpack and you’re about to get on the subway. But you see uniformed police officers screening riders’ bags and purses for explosives at the turnstile up ahead.
What do you do?
Our guess is you turn around, walk a few blocks to a CTA station where the police are not doing searches, and get on a train with your bomb.
Crains: City gives elevator inspections the shaft
If you thought that elevator you rode downstairs or up to work this morning has been properly inspected and any defects repaired, think again.
A report out today by Chicago Inspector General Joe Ferguson lambastes the city’s elevator inspection program, saying that as few as a fifth of elevators get the required annual checkup. And when problems are found, it can take years for required work to actually take place.
The poor performance costs the city as much as $1 million a year in lost fees, the report says. And though no dangerous conditions were unearthed, there’s a clear implication in the report that rider safety may have been compromised.
Chicago Tribune: Quinn’s IDOT scandal will cost taxpayers
A hiring monitor’s work is never done. Chicago attorney Noelle Brennan, who spent nine years shepherding the city of Chicago into compliance with a federal consent decree banning patronage hires, will soon hang her shingle at the Illinois Department of Transportation.
You can pull out your wallet now and thank Gov. Pat Quinn.
Just more of the same in Illinois.
Fiscal Times: U.S. jobless claims rise, but underlying labor market trends firming
The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose for a second straight week last week, but remained at levels consistent with a firming labor market.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 3,000 to a seasonally adjusted 287,000 for the week ended Oct. 25, the Labor Department said on Thursday.
The four-week moving average of claims, considered a better measure of labor market trends as it irons out week-to-week volatility, fell 250 to 281,000. Claims at these levels indicate a strengthening in labor market conditions.
State Journal Register: Illinois’ fiscal situation is worse than you know or candidates will admit
Illinois’ fiscal situation is brutal. A large and growing gap between spending and sustainable revenue is made worse by huge claims on future revenues from past IOUs. Eventually, the General Assembly and governor will be forced to pick losers by deciding which combination of painfully large spending cuts and tax increases to enact.
Don’t look to candidates for full disclosure of the magnitude of the problem or specifics on policies scaled to address it. They seek votes with easy sounding solutions, not by stressing how painful things will be. Still, ordinary citizens have a crucial stake in knowing how bad things are.
The University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs started the Fiscal Futures Project at the University of Illinois to provide objective, non-partisan, forward-looking analysis of the state’s budget situation. Our model of the state budget projects past revenue and spending patterns into the future. Key to our analysis is sustainable revenue — inflows of tax collections and other receipts, not counting one-time sources like borrowing. For decades, Illinois has spent billions of dollars more each year than its revenue flows could sustain and issued IOUs to cover the difference. There are three key elements of the resulting mess.
Daily Herald: Wauconda library awaits $2 million interior renovation
Although the heavy work won’t begin until mid-November, preparation for a $2 million renovation of the Wauconda Area Library is underway.
Some books in the collection already have been moved to other areas in preparation for the hammering, sawing and drilling to come.
More significantly, the children’s department on the lower level of the library, 801 N. Main St., will be closed starting Monday. A limited amount of books and other materials for young patrons will be located near the adult services reference desk.
Washington Post: The economy just grew 3.5 percent, but the recovery is still incredibly mediocre
The economy grew at a faster-than-expected 3.5 percent pace in the third quarter, but hold the confetti. Beneath the headlines, growth was still just slow and steady, like it has been the whole recovery. Plus ça change, well, you know.
Now I don’t want to be too fatalistic. There was some good news. Government finally stopped being a drag on the recovery, adding 0.83 percentage points to growth on the strength of more defense spending. And the economy was able to grow as much as it did despite inventories, which tend to swing wildly up and down, subtracting 0.57 percentage points from it. In other words, this good-but-not-great growth wasn’t all due to one-off factors that will disappear next quarter.
But some of it was, though. Net exports, which are also notoriously volatile, added a whopping 1.32 percentage points to growth last quarter. That certainly won’t continue. But what will, unfortunately, is the utter lack of momentum in the housing market. Now if you squint, you might be able to see the 0.06 percentage points of growth that residential investment added to growth, but only if you have better eyesight than I. The recovery, in other words, continues to distinguish itself with a housing market that isn’t leading it, but is rather stuck in the doldrums. And that despite historically low mortgage rates and a housing surplus that’s actually turned into a shortage. (That’s how badly we’ve been under building since the bust).
Chicago Business Journal: PNC finds Chicago small business owners are optimistic, but cautiously so
There’s still plenty of optimism about the future among small and mid-sized business owners in Chicago. That’s the good news takeaway from a new PNC Financial Services economic outlook survey for Chicago. The less positive news is that there’s been no big surge in the level of optimism since the last PNC survey six months ago.
The new survey found that 88 percent of business owners expressed optimism about their company’s prospects for the next six months, exactly the same percentage that had a positive outlook six months ago. But that percentage was up a bit from 81 percent a year ago.
Still the brutal Chicago winter of 2014 remains a drag on small- and medium-sized businesses in Chicago. The latest PNC report shows that more than one in three businesses (36 percent) were adversely affected by the extreme weather conditions in Chicago at the start of the year. And a whopping 63 percent of those affected by the weather said their businesses have not yet fully recovered from the weather wallop.
CARTOON OF THE DAY
