The bad news is that employees will bear more of the burden:

Well over half (59 percent) of employers taking action to reduce their 2009 cost increase will raise deductibles, copayments, coinsurance or employee out-of-pocket spending limits. Employee cost-sharing has risen sharply over the past five years:  Between 2003 and 2007, the median family deductible for in-network services in a PPO (the type of plan offered by the most employers) rose from $1,000 to $1,500.

Consumer-directed health care — an idea near and dear to John McCain’s heart — is gaining some traction. Nineteen percent of employers see these plans, which have high deductibles and give workers an incentive to control spending, as a cost-control strategy. Companies with consumer-directed plans expect costs to go up just 4.5 percent next year, Mercer says.

The economists, relying on data from Austria, find that both white- and blue-collar workers suffer in the first few years after a mass layoff, but that the office-dwelling crowd suffers more. And the manual laborers eventually bounce back:

Moreover, for blue collar workers employment losses are modest and earnings reductions are negligible in the long-run (years 6-10 after displacement). In contrast, white collar workers experience strongly negative employment and earnings effects also in the long run.

The authors say the result probably has something to do with “firm-specific human capital.” That’s the knowledge a worker gains about a company’s culture, products and  procedures, and it’s the stuff of which white-collar careers are made. Throw the worker out of the firm, and such knowledge quickly loses value.

If you look only at data from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, you’ll think the Gateway City has escaped major damage from the housing downturn:  OFHEO’s house price index for St. Louis is down just 0.44 percent in the second quarter, and it’s still up 0.78 percent when compared with the second quarter of last year.

The local picture looks much bleaker in the RPX Monthly Housing Report, published by a firm called Radar Logic. RPX looks at price per square foot, and its measure for St. Louis is down 13.5 percent between June 2007 and June 2008. Over five years, RPX ranks St. Louis among the five worst-performing metro areas, along with Detroit, Cleveland, Sacramento and San Diego.

The truth about the St. Louis housing market probably lies somewhere between OFHEO’s rosy scenario and RPX’s depressing numbers. In a column in June, here’s how I explained the shortcomings of these two measures:

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, source of the positive number, excludes whole categories of home transactions, including those financed with subprime and jumbo mortgages. So it misses most effects of the credit crunch.

Radar Logic’s RPX report, source of the worst negative number, uses a price-per-square-foot calculation that gives a lot of weight to large, expensive homes. It’s probably a good indicator of the markdowns on McMansions, but it may overstate the effect on a modest home’s value.

The country’s $2.7 billion of 5.8 percent bonds due 2028 gained 45 percent since August 2007, according to Merrill Lynch & Co. indexes. Investors demand 4.84 percentage points more in yield to own the debt instead of Treasuries, down from 7.26 percentage points a year ago. The spread is narrower than for notes of Ohio banks National City Corp. and KeyCorp, suggesting Baghdad may be safer for bond investors than Cleveland.

In Iraq’s case, the market is focused on the amount of oil it has in the ground. In the banks’ case, the focus is on much less attractive assets, like subprime mortgages and foreclosed houses.

The publication quotes Boeing spokesman Tim Healy:

“This proposal reflects our effort to listen to employees and (develop) an agreement they’ll be happy with,” Mr. Healy said.

The underlying cost concerns behind the proposal to close the DB plan to new employees haven’t changed, Mr. Healy said. “A (DC plan) for employees will continue to be something that we’ll talk about, but for this contract, it’s out,” he said.

Looks like the Labor Department’s household survey (used to calculate the unemployment rate) and its payroll survey are telling much different stories about St. Louis. The payroll numbers show a relatively modest drop in employment here.

Here are a few of the ways folks are trying to justify this $50 billion loan package, with my response:

• The Japanese subsidize their auto industry, so we should do the same. As Daniel Griswold notes, recent criticism of Japan revolves around the notion that it holds down the value of the yen to promote exports. Griswold doesn’t think this is really having much of an effect on the auto market. But even if it does, is Japan the nation we want to emulate? It’s been an economic basket case since the mid-1990s and may be headed for recession again. 
• We subsidize housing and Big Oil, so why not carmakers? First of all, I have argued that, when we finish bailing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of their current problems we ought to privatize them and leave housing finance to the banking industry. As regards Big Oil, its subsidies come in the form of tax breaks, some of which admittedly are hard to justify. But that’s part of the bigger problem with our corporate tax code, and the answer is to get rid of loopholes, not create a whole new kind of corporate welfare.
• The government created the problem, so it needs to solve it. I’ve heard a couple of versions of this story — Mike hangs the Detroit Three’s problems on U.S. labor laws, while Eric blames corporate average fuel economy standards.  The important thing to keep in mind here is these laws apply broadly to all auto companies (and all employers, in the case of labor laws). Light trucks were favored under the CAFE standards, but Toyota, Honda and others didn’t bet the whole company on pickups and SUVs. Ford, GM and Chrysler did, and they’re learning now that it was a losing bet.

Now, though, a Federal Reserve Board staff economist says the Fed is right to focus on core inflation. The traditional justification for using the core number is that by leaving out food and energy prices, which are extremely volatile, one can better discern the underlying, long-term trend. That’s still true, Michael T. Kiley writes:

Similar to other U.S. toll roads the bridge has experienced traffic declines due to high fuel prices and a general economic downturn. However, the discretionary nature of traffic has resulted in larger declines than at other comparable facilities. July was the sixth consecutive month in which traffic was less than the same month the previous year.

Fitch is putting the bridge’s bonds on “ratings watch negative,” and will downgrade the debt within six months if “management does not act aggressively in the interests of bondholders.”

Translated: The debt-rating company wants a fare increase. Cars currently pay $2.50 to cross between April and September and $1.50 the rest of the year. Fitch says a 30 percent fare increase would enable the bridge to meet its debt-coverage requirements and “produce strong surplus flows.”

The bridge has never drawn as much traffic as was predicted when it opened in 1998, but traffic was growing steadily until this year.

Currie continues with the comparison:

Add on the declines at BMW, Fiat and Renault and the industry incinerated $180bn of market value since shares hit their highs between July and October last year – that’s six times more than the combined drop at Ford and GM. Throw in Peugot’s drop and the non-US automotive group’s decline hits $190bn.

Of course, GM’s and Ford’s shares have been beaten down for years. In dollar terms, they simply didn’t have much left to lose. In percentage terms, the U.S. companies are the value-destruction champs, but there’s plenty of pain to go around: Toyota is down 26 percent in the past year, BMW has fallen 36 percent and Daimler is off 31 percent.

Honda, which Currie doesn’t mention, is a relative standout: Its Tokyo-listed shares are down just 3 percent in the past year.