They note that college fees have been rising far faster than incomes. Perhaps if all higher education could be conducted somewhere in Asia where salaries are lower and benefits are not so generous, a college degree wouldn’t be so expensive.

Workers Fear Savings Won’t Last in Retirement

Most workers are worried that their retirement savings won’t last the rest of their life. Only 40 percent of current workers say they will have enough money to finance a 25-year of retirement, according to a new Towers Watson survey of 3,099 full time employees in the private sector. Just 62 percent of the survey respondents think their retirement savings will last even 15 years.

“Despite some signs of an economic recovery, many employees remain apprehensive about the future of their retirement,” says Kevin Wagner, a senior retirement consultant at Towers Watson. “The financial crisis hit employees hard and eroded both their savings and confidence in being able to retire comfortably.”

Employees with a traditional pension are considerably more likely to feel satisfied with their financial situation than those with only a 401(k) plan. Over half (52 percent) of workers with a traditional pension are confident that they will have enough resources for a comfortable 25-year retirement, compared to a third (34 percent) of employees with a 401(k) or similar type of retirement account.

Understandably, there is growing fear that traditional pension plans will not be able to deliver on their promises and, at some point, the same will be true for government workers.

Also, see 5 Ways to Calm Your Retirement Fears and pay particular attention to items 2 and 3 that, in my view, are key - Increase your financial planning knowledge and Start changing your lifestyle now. More emphasis on understanding spending – not just retirement income – would have been nice, but this is a good start for most people.

It must really suck to be an HR person around this time of the year as you prepare to tell all the company employees how much more they’ll be paying for their health insurance premiums in the year ahead. Of course, most workers are probably just happy to have a job, so the push back is likely not what it was just a few years ago before the recession began.

Against the backdrop of some unsettling economic data in the past few weeks, today’s numbers are reassuring that growth and recovery are continuing. At the same time, the fact that the growth of private-sector payrolls is below the level needed to keep up with normal growth of the labor force is obviously unacceptable. There are a number of steps we could take to help increase private sector job growth and put the economy on a path of steadily declining unemployment. We will be working with Congress on these measures in the coming weeks.

It’s not likely that this sort of “reassurance” is going to pass muster with voters in a couple months when they go to the polls and the fact that the President’s top economic advisers are exiting stage left just when it looks as though things are about to take a turn for the worse only adds to the growing concern that Americans will soon be able to express.

The increase in private payrolls was more than the consensus estimate of 40,000 and, coming after an upwardly revised gain of 107,000 in July, eased some fears that higher jobless claims might lead to renewed job losses for U.S. companies.

The unemployment rate ticked one-tenth of a percentage point higher due to more workers entering the labor force and the broad measure of U6 underemployment – including those accepting part-time work instead of full-time work and those who have stopped looking for work – rose from 16.5 percent to 16.7 percent.

By category, it was a familiar story in August as the health care industry continues to be a steady source of job growth with a net gain of more than 40,000 jobs and temporary hiring (within the Professional and Business Services category below) bounced back from a modest decline in July with a gain of 16,800.

At odds with the latest manufacturing surveys where employment was seen expanding, the Labor Department reported that manufacturing payrolls were lower by 27,000, the third decline in the last four months.

The biggest losses, however, came from the government sector, all but 7,000 of the net payrolls decline of 121,000 coming from laid off Census workers. State governments saw payrolls decline by 14,000, but local governments added 4,000 jobs.

MARKETS/INVESTING
Oil falls below $75 ahead of US jobs report – AP
Gold steady, ETF holdings down awaiting job data – Reuters
Art Cashin: Expect Big Stock Moves on Friday – CNBC
Wheat Rises on Russian Export Ban; Mozambique Riots – Bloomberg
TrimTabs: Hedge Funds Expect To Raise Leverage In September – Zero Hedge
18, 31 or 60? Age-Based Gold Investing Plans – The Street
Is Copper Trying To Tell You Something? – CNBC
Equity defies its eulogizers – MarketWatch

ECONOMY/WORLD/HOUSING/BANKING
Employed, but still stressed by joblessness – VC Star
AFL-CIO: We need a second stimulus program – McClatchy
Heavy in dollars, China warns of depreciation – Reuters
Japan Said to View U.S. Opposition as Yen Intervention Obstacle – Bloomberg
Rebuild the path to the American homeownership – Washington Post
Pending Home Sales Rise in Sign Market Steadying – Bloomberg
Bernanke Says He Failed to See Financial Flaws – NY Times
More than 400 US Banks Will Fail: Roubini – CNBC

It really didn’t take much to solve this riddle – it was more a matter of it never rising to the level where any attention was ever focused on it.

To wit, how can they sell these little bottles that are seemingly filled with gold (about two inches high) in the many Gold Country gift shops that dot the western U.S. for just six or eight dollars a pop?

Surely, there has to be more than a couple dollars worth of gold in these little bottles that are marked “99.99 Percent Pure Gold” while, at the same time, the manufacturer and retailer can’t be selling them at a loss.

Well, malleability is the operative word here and a display in the mining section of the Dillon Museum is what prompted the writing of this post. According to one of the displays, a single ounce of gold can be hammered into a flat sheet that spreads out into something like a 100 foot square. (Note that I don’t recall the exact number, but it was much, much bigger than you would believe when looking down at a one-ounce gold coin in the palm of your hand that is about an inch and a half in diameter).

Apparently, gold leaf can made unbelievably thin, a post over at Zero Hedge today noting that it “is commonly 0.18 microns (seven millionths of an inch) thick. It’s so thin that a stack of 7,055 sheets would be no thicker than a dime.”

The folks who make these little bottles filled with gold leaf are probably making a killing.

Industry sales also fell 5% from July levels. August sales typically outpace July, as deals become available on older models ahead of the fall introduction of new model year cars. August sales would equate to an annual sales pace of about 11.5 million vehicles.

“Car buying is far from repaired, and consumers hesitate before they make a big ticket purchase,” said Jesse Toprak, an analyst with the auto pricing Web site Truecar.com. “It shows that the recovery is going to be much slower and more painful than expected.”

They used to say, “what’s more important than how the 5 percent unemployed spend their money is how those 95 percent who still have jobs spend theirs”. It seems only the numbers have changed, that is, from 5 to 10 percent unemployed.

Of course, Mercedes is reportedly having a blockbuster year…

Will the White House have to replace its recovery blog with a double-dip one?

Have you read the White House’s Recovery Blog? If not, you’re joining a large number of Americans who have failed to log on.

The 8.5m who lost their jobs in the recession; the 1.2m who have given up looking for work and, finally, the Republicans who can smell a Democratic President in trouble.

Like the recession, America’s recovery is departing from the normal script. Since World War II, the deeper the downturn the economy has endured, the steeper the recovery it has enjoyed on the way up. But a summer that brought record temperatures to many parts of the country has seen the momentum that the economy began to lose in the spring evaporate further.
…
Critics of the administration cannot say it hasn’t taken action. There’s the original $800bn American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that was passed in February last year. Then there’s the HIRE Act, which provides a tax credit for companies that employ people who have been out of work for more than two months, and the list extends to the cash-for-clunkers programme, the homebuyers’ tax credit and the National Export Initiative
…
The President’s immediate priority, though, is to make sure he doesn’t have to replace the Recovery Blog, with a much nastier sounding Double-Dip one.

Tomorrow’s labor report will go a long way in determining if such a change will be needed…

At 9,280 tonnes, the inventory is still a bit short of the high seen in late-2009 at 9,514 tonnes, but, with the price of silver rising as it has been, that could change very quickly.

Full Disclosure: Long silver coins and bars