In January, he was hired to run a front-end loader as part of a Port of Miami expansion project, making $18.62 an hour. "I'm so happy," Way, 39, said in an interview. "This really helps me out."
While the four states all have higher unemployment than the U.S. average, they will make quicker progress in reducing it this year, forecasts Moody's Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania. California may drop to 9.8 percent from 11.2 percent in December, Florida to 8.9 percent from 9.9 percent, Nevada to 12.5 percent from 13 percent and Arizona to 8.5 percent from 9 percent, according to Moody's. The national jobless rate is forecast to be 8.2 percent at year's end, Moody's said.
Florida and Nevada are both swing states in the presidential campaign, and Nevada is also a critical contest in the struggle for control of the Senate. Obama campaign officials are targeting Arizona, which has a growing Hispanic population sympathetic to Democrats.
Florida, with its 29 electoral votes accounting for more than a tenth of the 270 needed to win the presidency, has swung between Republicans and Democrats to side with the winning candidate in the past four presidential elections. Nevada, which Obama narrowly carried in 2008, has supported the winner in every election since 1976. The Senate election in Nevada is one of 10 in the country rated a "toss-up" by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
Household wealth in the U.S. climbed from October through December for the first time in three quarters, the Federal Reserve said March 8. Household debt rose at a 0.3 percent annual rate last quarter, the first increase in more than three years, the report showed. Consumers' ratio of debt payments to disposable income in the third quarter was the lowest since 1994, a separate Fed report found.
Price declines have reduced net worth of homeowners in states where housing boomed from 2002 to 2006. The states with the largest average home price declines from their peaks to January 2012 have been Nevada, 60 percent; Arizona, 51 percent; Florida, 49 percent; and California, 44 percent, according to CoreLogic, a provider of real estate information.
While home prices have continued to fall, residential investment, including homebuilding as well as renovations, contributed to U.S. economic growth in the fourth quarter, government figures show. It subtracted from growth from 2006 to 2011.
"Housing is no longer a drag on the economy and is turning into a slight positive," said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina. California is gaining from "the social networking boom and growth in smart-phones and tablet PCs," while in Florida, "tourism has been exceptionally strong."
Tech Companies Expanding
Technology companies are scooping up commercial real estate in the Financial District and South of Market areas of San Francisco to accommodate their expanding workforce. LinkedIn Corp., the biggest professional-networking website, Salesforce.com Inc., the largest maker of online customer- management software and Macys.com, the retailer's e-commerce division, were among technology companies that leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in the city in January and February, according to a press release from Mayor Edwin Lee's office.
"It is a complete war for talent every single day," Mike Guerchon, senior vice president of global employee services at Riverbed Technology Inc., the San Francisco-based maker of computer-networking products, said in a March 8 telephone interview. "What our recruiters tell me is that every engineer that we're talking to has three or four other offers from other companies."