Paul O'Leary's Blog

Here's an interesting link from the census bureau. It basically says that San Jose has grown by 6500 people to become the 10th largest city in the United States. This happened even with the slowdown in high-tech these last few years. But at the same time, the population of San Francisco dropped by 32,000 people.

The next meeting of the Federal Reserve is this week. Here's a handy schedule of their meetings for the rest of the year

The fed has already raised short term interest rates during each of the last 8 meetings (since last June). Conventional wisdom is that this week's meeting will be no exception.

I was looking at the employement numbers for California for this May compared to last year.

Here are some interesting numbers for May of 2004 and 2005(preliminary) that I found on a State of California website:

Californian Workforce (Employed + Unemployed)
2005: 17,704,700
2004: 17,416,990
Difference: 287,710

Californian Employed
2005: 16,823,900
2004: 16,371,100
Difference: 452,800

So while the Total workforce grew 287,000, the number of employed grew a lot faster(452,800). So things are definitely going in the right direction. Unemployement is shrinking.

Then I took a look at some of the counties in the Bay Area to see how they were doing. Here's a snapshot of Santa Clara County (San Jose is the largest city in the county).

Santa Clara Workforce (employed + Unemployed)
2005:818,400
2004:821,000

Santa Clara Employed
2005:777,500
2004:767,600

In Santa Clara county, the number of employed has grown by 10,000 in the past year but the total workforce will not budge. The workforce in Santa Clara county is actually less than a year ago. Incoming relocations are not replacing the number of relocations out of the states, or people who are leaving the workforce. So with the total workforce shrinking slightly and employement improving, the unemployment rate is down.

So this is my first post. I went to a meeting of bloggers today at KRON in San Francisco, and this inspired me to start up my own blog. I've had bloggs in the past(before they were called bloggs), but it was more or less anonymous, so I thought I'd post this one with my name on it!

I plan to write about corporate relocation as well as some areas that don't involve corporate relocation, so do stay tuned!