Sounds like a piece of can-do advice from a job recruiter, but we mean it literally.

Now you can print your resume on your tee-shirt.

From damnIneedAjob.com:

The shirt costs $25 (plus $3 shipping). Add three bucks if outside the continental United States. Upon submission of this form you will be directed to PayPals secure site where you can use your PayPal account or any major credit card.

Your cover letter should be one short paragraph not exceeding 500 characters including spaces. I invite you to paste an encyclopedia into the field but it will be truncated. Keep it brief! People won’t read it if it’s too long! Carriage returns (blank lines) will also be removed. Write it as though you were submitting it formally yet generic enough that all your bases are covered. I suggest a brief description of your skills and what kind of position you are looking for. Any misspellings or grammatical errors WILL BE ON YOUR SHIRT so be careful to proof read it. I recommend doing it in a word processor like Word and utilizing it’s spell check and word count tools then copy and paste into the cover letter field. While I probably won’t, I reserve to the right to refuse submissions for whatever reason.

Blog post from How To Be Poor In America, by Susan Kemp, who has “gone from being a teenage welfare mother to being appointed Assistant Welfare Commissioner for my State.” Now, due to her health and ‘bad business decisions,” she has fallen on hard times.

Foreclosure – Finding the Federal Mortgage Money

…The day the foreclosure papers arrived in the mail I went (as they used to say) wang dang doodle nuts! I dropped to my knees because I couldn’t support my own weight and on the other hand I’m not a fainter. I had a vision of my furniture being hauled out on to the front lawn. I’ve lived in neighborhoods where people actually watched for eviction notices to be posted on doors so they could raid some stranger’s belongings. I’ve watched people frantically trying to hang onto their belongs while people darted in and out stealing away bits and pieces of their life. The woman would cry while the man yelled and threatened and their children watched like those wide eyes paintings. Did I mention these things never seem to happen on bright sunny days? So anyway, the process server handed me a thick envelope that basically boiled down to “GET OUT,” said in legal language. One of the few things that has helped me get through the last three years of my woman-made financial nightmare is facing almost everything as if I’m doing it for someone else. In this case I was working to help someone save their home. But the gravity of what was happening, the possibility of having nowhere to live made it impossible to pretend it wasn’t actually happening to me.

From 1995 to 2006 I was privileged to be appointed by then Governor George E. Pataki and my primary responsibility was research… I’d been hearing a lot about how some portion of the Federal bailout money had been set aside to help people like me who’d fallen behind on their mortgages. In my case I’d had to make some hard choices. It takes up to six months for review of your application for disability. While the review is ongoing you cannot make any money. Some friends have speculated that the idea is to force you into bankruptcy while you wait for a decision. I still had bills to pay while I was waiting. Electricity to keep on, fuel oil to keep me warm and medical bills, lots and lots of medical bills and co-pays to cover. Let’s not even talk about the cost of medications. So I used what would have been mortgage money and I’m willing to bet I’m far from alone. It’s called robbing Peter to pay Paul and if Paul’s up in heaven waiting for his cash he’s going to be a very rich man when I die.

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From the LearnVest blog:

Making the Most of a Thin Resume.

When you’re short on experience, play up your strengths.

The Problem: Recession or not, you’re job hunting. Trouble is, aside from some internships and a few part-time gigs, the work experience section of your resume is, well, thin. You know that you could nail a job if given the chance – but with the national unemployment rate hovering around 10%, how to get a foot in the door with so little to go on?

The Solution: A resume redo. The key is highlighting your accomplishments, regardless of how you got them. Definitely include when you graduated and whatever positions you’ve held since – employers want to see that. But, also list volunteer organizations, student clubs, sports teams, or any group in which you’ve held a leadership position or made an impact. Detail projects completed, funds raised or other positive outcomes; you want to point to anything that shows your capabilities, especially if it dovetails with requirements of the job you’re going after. And, here’s a tip from executive recruiters: Describe your efforts using keywords that mirror the language in an employer’s job listing, so they can connect the dots between your skills and their position. If you’re going after a marketing associate job, for example, outline the email marketing campaign you created for your campus bookstore that led to a 10% increase in sales.

One More Thing: No matter what type of job you’re going after, be sure to include in-demand skills such as foreign languages and computer know-how – we’re talking about spreadsheets and database programs, here, not Facebook. Of course, it’s all relative. If all you can say is, “Basic Microsoft Word,” then you might not want to highlight that that’s all you know.

If You’re The Do-It-Yourself Type: You’ll have no problem revamping your resume with the help of free templates from Microsoft, About.com or other online sources – some even have those all-important keywords built in. If you need a little coaching, have a professional resume service to do it for you – though you’ll pay for the convenience. Websites such as ResumeWriters.com or Monster.com charge anywhere from $100 to $300 for a finished product that you’ll get back in two to three days. Everyone has a different resume style preference, however, and we’ve spoken to executive recruiters who think that professional resume services create resumes that are too complicated and fluffy.

Before you part with any cash, do some digging. With so many people out of work, public libraries are holding free resume writing workshops, and universities have made resume and career counseling services available to recent grads and other alumni.

Good luck!

From a “visual business cliché find-it poster,” from the company XPLANE.

Includes “low-hanging fruit,” “dealbreaker,” “drink the Kool-Aid,” “get your ducks in a row,” “hard stop,” “mission critical,” “take it offline,” “whiteboard it,” and of course, “think outside the box.” Click on the picture to see it full-size.

According to this chart from Visual Economics, there are 1.65 trillion pennies in circulation.

That’s messed up.

Spotted on Facebook, two photos from Detroit, by Dan Haddad.

Economist Jeff Frankel, who is a member of the committee that officially calls the beginning and end of recessions, says last week’s announcement that the economy added jobs in March has put a nail in the coffin of the Great Recession. But economist Mark Thoma is more cautious.

First, Frankel:

Job market confirms end of recession

The recession is over. The last piece has fallen into place, with the BLS announcement that employment rose in March.

Identifying the beginnings and ends of recessions has been difficult in recent decades because the two most important indicators, output and employment, have sometimes behaved differently from each other. Most notoriously, in the recovery that began in November 2001, employment lagged far behind economic growth. If one had gone by the labor market, one might have called it a three year recession. But if one had gone by GDP, one might have wondered whether there was a recession at all.

This time around, the difficulty is not so great. True, the magnitude of job loss after December 2007 was unparalleled since the 1930s. It was severe even relative to the loss of GDP. But contrary to some impressions, the labor market in this recovery has not lagged unusually far behind the rest of the economy. It always lags behind somewhat: due to costs of search, hiring and training, firms wait until the recovery is reasonably well established before adding workers to the payroll. But by either of two criteria, the lag has not been unusually long this time. First, the three months of greatest job loss virtually coincided with the three months of greatest output loss, in the first quarter of 2009, as had also been the the case in the 1991 and 2001 recessions.

By July 2009, job market indicators were showing their first signs of life. Second, with the latest figures, employment changes have now turned positive. This is the more definitive criterion, because a recovery is defined as a period of increasing economic activity. The nine month wait was painful. But the lag between positive income growth (June 2009) and positive job growth (March 2010) turned out to be shorter than in the preceding two recessions (one to two years)…

And here’s Thoma’s response:

“The recession is over”

Jeff Frankel — a member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee — says: The recession is over.

He is basing this conclusion on the recent job market number showing positive employment growth:

…with the latest figures, employment changes have now turned positive. This is the more definitive criterion, because a recovery is defined as a period of increasing economic activity, not a period when economic activity is high. The nine month wait was painful. But the lag between positive income growth (June 2009) and positive job growth (March 2010) turned out to be shorter than in the preceding two recessions (one to two years). …

He may well be right, but I’m waiting for more than one month of somewhat encouraging employment data before coming to that conclusion. It’s always possible that one month is a blip, not a trend. In addition, the conclusion is based upon the fact that labor markets are exhibiting positive growth, but positive growth is all that is required, the strength of the growth is not the determining factor. However, even though growth is positive, it is very sluggish and as David Altig notes, at current rates of job creation, the unemployment rate will still be over 9% a year from now. So this is by no means an “all clear” signal for labor markets.

If you’re out of work, you might find it hard to conjure up sympathy for someone who has actually landed a job in Hollywood. On the other hand, ever see the movie Swimming With Sharks, about an assistant to a Hollywood bigwig who is also the world’s biggest SOB?

But there’s even a lower life form in the Hollywood pecking order than assistants, apparently. From Hollywood Temp Diaries, this description:

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Out of work with a lot of extra time on your hands? Check out the web site Daily Routines to learn how famous artists, philosophers, scientists, and statesmen organized their days for optimal productivity. For instance:

• Winston Churchill – awake at 7:30 am, breakfast in bed with mail and newspapers. Bath at 11, garden walk, a whiskey and soda. At 1pm, a 2 1/2 hour lunch.
• John Grisham – writing by 5:30 am, with goal of at least one page per day.
• Karl Marx – daily visits to the British Museum reading room
• Charles Darwin – walk, breakfast, work, letters, work, lunch, rest, walk, dinner
• Immanuel Kant – up at 5:00 am followed by weak tea, pipe smoking, and meditation
• Barack Obama – workout at 6:45 am, Oval Office by 9. Newspapers, breakfast with family, sees daughters off to school. Dinner is with family, then often back to work.

More here…

One of the sticking points in the Senate in enacting the financial reform bill is the creation of a new consumer financial protection agency, which Republicans have ardently opposed.

This post by former World Bank and Federal Reserve economist Barbara N. Opper, on the financial sector policy blog Finance: Facts and Follies, summarizes the dismantling of consumer protections in the mortgage and credit card industries in the 2000s.

Many of the steps violating unsophisticated consumers’ protections against predatory lending came from a cascade of federal, not state, regulatory actions and legislation.

The financial industry’s influence on Washington, evident in the late 1980s when Alan Greenspan went to Chair the Fed, gained momentum between 2000 and 2008 when the industry ‘captured’ the administration and Congress. Investors sophisticated or not lost protection, as did consumers, especially the unsophisticated. As the famous post-Napoleon expression goes, this was “worse than a crime it was a blunder” because US financial institutions’ ability to attract profitable business worldwide rested on the trust that had been the outcome of our once-effective regulation.

To set the stage, in the 1970s a lot of consumer protection came into place. States enacted “Truth in Lending Laws” and the Fed was to handle consumer protections related to bank lending. By then, 64% of residents owned their homes, financed by self-amortizing home mortgages most of which carried fixed rates. With regulators enforcing strict underwriting standards, delinquency and foreclosure rates were very low. Credit cards were issued only to those with very strong credit records.

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