Booneville job gains, area housing decline part of weekly business news

The City Wire economic review for the week of Mar. 30 – April 3:

REGIONAL/STATE
• American Spirit Wear announced Mar. 31 it will locate a new production facility and about 30 jobs in Booneville. ASW is a wholesale supplier of jackets for sports, hunting and corporate and outwear, as well as special order for screen printers, embroiders and ad specialty. The company will lease about 30,000 square feet in the former Today’s Plastics building that is now owned by Rockline Industries. Rockline, which employs about 135 in its Booneville operation, uses about 400,000 square feet of the building to manufacture and distribute wet wipes.

• The real estate market continues to struggle in the Fort Smith region, with February home sales dipping almost 30% in Crawford County and down more than 16% in Sebastian County. There were 218 homes sold in January and February in Crawford, Franklin and Sebastian counties, down 21.2% from the 277 sold in the same period of 2008, according to report released April 1 by the Arkansas Realtors Association.

• The preliminary February unemployment rate for the Fort Smith region decreased to 7.3% after spiking up to 7.7% in January. However, the rate is more than 2% above the February 2008 unemployment rate of 5.1%. Manufacturing job losses continue to be a big factor in pushing the rate higher. According to the preliminary numbers from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing employment in the Fort Smith metro area has dipped 10.1% in the past 12 months. Regional manufacturing jobs totaled an estimated 23,100 in February.

• The value of March building permits issued in Fort Smith totaled $21.48 million, down 14.1% from the value of permits issued in March 2008. Van Buren city officials issued 70 permits in March for work valued at $2.182 million. Of that, $503,000 was for single-family residential work and $1.25 million for an apartment complex at 1032 S. 30th St.

NATIONAL
• Consumer loan delinquencies continued to rise at the end of 2008, the American Bankers Association reported Thursday. The association said the delinquency rate during the fourth quarter of 2008 increased to 3.22%. It is the highest delinquency rate since the ABA began tracking the data in the 1970s. The delinquency rate was 2.90% during the third quarter.

• Orders placed with U.S. factories rose in February, ending six straight months of declines, the government reported Thursday.

• Five banks have repaid millions of dollars they received from the government’s $700 billion financial bailout pot. The Treasury Department, which oversees the bailout program, said the banks returned a total of $353 million, according to published reports.
The banks are: Iberiabank Corp. of Lafayette, La.; Bank of Marin Bancorp of Novato, Calif.; Old National Bancorp. of Evansville, Ind.; Signature Bank of New York; and Centra Financial Holdings Inc. of Morgantown, W.Va. They were the first banks to repay the government, wanting to escape the increasingly tough restrictions placed on participants in the rescue program. In addition to the $353 million, the banks paid the government a total of $5.4 million in dividends.

• The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 8.5% in March, the highest since late 1983, with around 663,000 jobs cut in the month. The number of unemployed people was 13.2 million in March. The number of people required to work part time rose by 423,000 to 9 million. Those are people who would like to work full time but whose hours were cut back or were unable to find full-time work.