Weekend business

The weekend business this week, Jeff Sommer with Catherine Rampell and Jack Healy had talked mainly about unemployment rate in the United States at this time. Then, Jeff, Tim O’Brien and Brooks Barnes went over Hollywood hotels; Randall Stross on digital book piracy; Gretchen Morgenson on the true price of bailouts; and Paul Lim on the limits of cost-cutting. But the topics that attract my attention are about the unemployment rate and the digital book piracy.

The employment bureau of the United States announced that the unemployment rate has been increasing to 9.8 and continues to trend up. At this rate, it is doubled from the start of economic recession in 2007. Almost every industry, especially manufacturing, constructing and financial, has been affected from the economic situation. The number of unemployment in both constructing and manufacturing industry has been climbing steadily during this year. On the other hand, there is an increasing demand for labor in service sector and healthcare education, with the largest increase occurring in ambulatory health care services. Catherine said that we might overestimate about the job we had. We are too optimistic about the job loss. The stimulus package launched by government is not sufficient to solve this major issue. Many people might wonder that why government doesn’t solve this problem by providing supported or temporally jobs for those unemployed. This is impossible since in economic recession period, many people lost their job and this makes government generate lower income tax revenue. That’s why the government doesn’t have enough budgets for stimulating the economy by hiring a number of people.

In Thailand, the unemployment rate has been increasing as well. There are an enormous number of people losing their job. Many businesses have to shut down their company and go bankruptcy as a result of economic recession this time. It is hard and harder to find a job at this time. Taking me as an example, I just graduated from the university this year and lots of my friend changes their mind to continue their master instead of finding the job. Since they know that it is wasting time keep finding job at this time because there won’t be any job left for them. Many big companies cut their budget for hiring new employee. Instead, they have increased the quota for internship worker during the busy time in order to reduce their cost. This could be proven that the economic rescission has stimulated the unemployment rate all over the world.

Another topic that grasps my attention is about the digital book piracy. In the business world nowadays, the internet is gaining more and more important role. There is a dramatically increasing number of e-business transactions. Digital book is one thing that becomes popular at this time. In the electronic world, I think it is hard to control over the violation of intellectual property. Many people might feel that it is more convenient for them to get a digital book instead but I’m sure that there is still a large amount of people who fond of reading the physical book. From my point of view, I don’t think the piracy of digital book is going to affect the physical one a lot. However, the author and publisher still need to protect the right of their intellectual property by the way.