NEW YORK (Reuters) – Bruno Martinho, a wind power engineer, moved quickly when he landed a new job in March that raised his pay by a third.

Within weeks, the 34-year-old was on his way to Houston from New York, a 1,600 mile journey, to monitor the wind in Texas, a booming center for wind power.

For those with skills in hot demand, the United States looks more like a land of opportunity again, especially if they are prepared to uproot and move for work.

But such people are more the exception than the rule. For most Americans, the country’s famously mobile labor market, long seen as a driver of its economy, is steadily becoming more static, according to several recent studies.

Even if the recovery from recession picks up speed, things may never quite be the same again.

“In the early 1990s about 3 percent of Americans moved between states each year. Today that rate has fallen in half,” Greg Kaplan, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, wrote in a recent study.

During the 2007-09 recession, companies slashed hiring and housing prices plunged. That combination deterred the few workers still sought by employers from selling their homes at a loss and moving on, compounding a downward trend in labor market mobility that began 20 years ago.

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – The Bellagio fountains, one of the most iconic of the Las Vegas water-based attractions, is said to contain 22 million gallons of water. It may look like a waste for a city in the middle of the Mojave desert, but for the moment there is no shortage of water in Nevada.

However, the abundance of water, in Las Vegas as elsewhere in the United States, is unlikely to last, according to a panel of experts at a forum of National Federation of Municipal Analysts held in the city, famous for its casinos.

Water rates will be slowly but constantly creeping up, and water utilities across the nation are likely to issue more debt to renew and expand their pipelines, analysts agreed.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which plans to issue a $360 million bond in July to upgrade old facilities and build new ones, is a good example.

“We already raised tariffs twice, $2 each year in 2010 and 2011 for residential customers,” said William Fox, chief financial officer at the Las Vegas Valley Water District, adding that he does not anticipate further rate hikes until 2014.

Other utilities, which might have not yet done so, will have to follow suit.

“With federal and state assistance limited we believe utility managers will likely ask more of their customers, especially in the form of rate adjustments,” a recent special report on water scarcity by Standard and Poor’s predicted.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Americans may need to take a wage cut if they want to start dealing with the deepening U.S. debt crisis, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund says.

For Simon Johnson, the Bush-era income tax cuts represent a de-facto pay hike that Americans happily accepted in 2001, but at the expense of the country’s fiscal discipline.

” We gave ourselves a big pay rise with the Bush tax cuts and frankly it is not sustainable,” said Johnson, whose new book on the U.S. deficit and debt challenges was published on Tuesday.

“White House Burning” is named after an episode during the war of 1812, when the British attacked the White House and Capitol Hill. The raid underscored the lack of tax revenues the fledging United States needed to defend itself against its enemies, and a lesson in the importance of careful budget management that America heeded for centuries afterwards.

In the book, Johnson and co-author James Kwak tell the story of how that discipline began to fall apart in the 1980s with the low-tax focus of the Reagan administration.

The U.S. public net debt load now stands at an estimated 78 percent of gross domestic product and is set to rise.

Johnson and Kwak pin the debt on both U.S. political parties for failing to understand the importance of keeping the surplus the government had as recently as 2001.

By Tiziana Barghini

(Reuters) – Susanna Mancini cherishes a photo of herself at 27: a smiling face behind a pair of dark sunglasses. On it, she scrawled to her future husband: “Too bad you can’t see my eyes. I am so proud of my tough yuppie stare!”

Her professional pride propelled her early career as a lawyer. She was successful and well paid for it. She kept working when her first child was born and was promoted to a more senior position in Citibank after her second child arrived.

But her career eventually succumbed to something Mancini never expected would end her rise at the bank – her husband’s even bigger success. She quit in 2005 when her six-digit income was overtaken by his seven-digit one.

“At that point, it was clear that my wage had become family pocket money. There was a real opportunity to do other things that did not require being chained to a desk,” said Mancini, now 50.

She is far from alone, according to a new study from the Federal Reserve, due to be published shortly.

It shows that between 1993 and 2006, there was a decline in the workforce of 0.1 percent a year on average in the number of college-educated women, with similarly educated spouses.

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – The head of the U.S. Export-Import Bank on Friday said Republicans were the biggest obstacle to renewal of the nearly 80-year-old bank’s charter and said the inaction creates business uncertainty, thwarts exports and threatens jobs.

“I do not know how this is going to end. We have been working hard for a year to get reauthorized because the Eximbank is a no-cost jobs bill,” Eximbank President Fred Hochberg told Reuters. “This should have been done in September.”

The Eximbank provides financing to help big U.S. exporters like Boeing and many smaller companies make sales considered too risky by private banks. Its charter is generally renewed for four or five years at a time, but the bank has been operating on temporary authority since October.

The Republican group Club for Growth has branded the bank as “corporate welfare,” and urged lawmakers to allow the bank to expire when its extension ends on May 31.

Hochberg rejected that charge, saying the bank operates “at no cost to the taxpayers” since it collects fees on its loans that cover all of the bank’s expenses. The bank has made a $1.9 billion profit over the last five years.

President Barack Obama’s administration has also asked Congress to raise the bank’s credit exposure cap to $140 billion, from $100 billion currently. A bill stalled in Congress would hike it to $135 billion.

Asked if Republicans were offering the most resistance to reauthorizing the bank’s charter, Hochberg said: “Yes, that would be without question.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A long, standing ovation greeted Italy’s Mario Monti when he entered the packed Card Room on the seventh floor of the New York Stock Exchange last week.

But that does not mean all of the 200 people in the audience were ready to send their money to the Mediterranean peninsula.

In less than three months, the Italian prime minister has led a quick turnaround of Italy and its 1.9 trillion euro ($2.5 trillion) debt, implementing a tough pension reform, showing his ability and will to move Europe’s third-largest economy ahead.

With his understated, toned-down style, he could not be further from the flamboyant theatrics of his predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, which is just what Wall Street likes.

U.S. investors will need to see more action from the 3-month-old government to believe Monti’s pledge that the “Euro crisis is nearly over.” Italy’s reforms must continue at a quick pace and actually generate economic growth before their applause translates into investments.

A solid financial firewall must be established in Europe to prevent crisis from spreading, those who welcomed Monti to Wall Street said after he returned to Rome.

“It’s been impressive how quickly the sentiment has changed on Italy,” said Charlie Himmelberg, managing director at Goldman Sachs, noting that the euro zone central bank had helped.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Greece’s debt crisis on Thursday dominated the first day of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti’s visit to the United States, as he urged the International Monetary Fund to be more lenient with Athens in bailout talks to prevent “a big potential explosion.”

Monti welcomed the IMF’s insistence that Europe erect a strong firewall to prevent debt contagion from spreading, but he also said the fund should not be too rigid in how it applies its lending requirements.

“If there is a minimum of compliance with the requirements set out, this is the moment to turn the page and extinguish this potential big explosion,” Monti told an economics think-tank before meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House.

Later in a news conference at the Italian Embassy, Monti said he had discussed Greece with Obama and that it was in everyone’s interest to ensure a “non-explosive solution of the Greek case.”

He also discussed the euro zone debt crisis with U.S. congressional leaders. On Friday, the Italian prime minister heads to New York where he will try to persuade Wall Street investors of his efforts to bring the budget of the euro zone’s third-largest economy under control.

“Where I see room for improvement on the part of the IMF is in having a broader understanding of specific situations where strict adherence to a model might prevent the pragmatic solution of the problem,” he told the audience at Peterson Institute.

Monti said his 12-week-old government had already seen positive results from a 30 billion euro ($39.91 billion) austerity package, which was introduced last year in the midst of a political and budgetary crisis.

WASHINGTON, Feb 9 (Reuters) – Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti on Thursday urged the International Monetary Fund to be lenient with Greece in bailout discussions to prevent “a big potential explosion.”

“This is the moment to consider that if there is a minimum of compliance with the requirements set out, this is the moment to turn the page and extinguish this potential big explosion,” Monti told the Peterson Institute policy think-tank in Washington.

He said he welcomed the IMF’s insistence that Europe erect a strong firewall to prevent debt contagion from spreading. “This is a correct attitude,” he said.

But Monti said the IMF should not be so rigid in how it applies its lending requirements.

“Where I see room for improvement on the part of the IMF is in having a broader understanding of specific situations where strict adherence to a model might prevent the pragmatic solution of the problem,” he added.

The so-called ‘troika’ of the IMF, European Union and European Central Bank are finalizing details of a second bailout for Greece in efforts to help it avoid a messy default in March.

Greek politicians on Thursday agreed to reform measures that would reduce the country’s budget deficit, a critical pre-condition by the troika for receiving more aid.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A top Bank of Italy official said on Tuesday that the European Central Bank will do what is needed to help Europe fight a deepening economic slowdown and the crisis in the region’s sovereign debt markets.

Bank of Italy Director General Fabrizio Saccomanni, in New York for meetings with investors, declined to comment on specific monetary measures that the ECB could take when its policymakers meet on Thursday.

But, he said, “we are confident that the ECB will do what is required in the present situation, also looking at the outlook for the European economy, which has deteriorated since the last meeting (of the board).”

Since ECB President Mario Draghi, formerly No. 1 at Bank of Italy, hinted that the central bank might consider some kind of action if policy makers agree on a “fiscal compact” for the single currency area, investors have bet on a more aggressive monetary stance rose.

Italy’s announcement of a package to reach a balanced budget in 2013 increased speculation that some kind of easing would be forthcoming by the ECB.

With 1.9 trillion euros in government debt, equal to around 120 percent of its gross domestic product, Italy become in recent months the fulcrum of a deep debt crisis that raised the prospect that the European 17-nation single currency could fail.

Saccomanni dismissed as exaggerated the fears of a euro zone break-up, saying that “member countries are now doing what is required to cope with the situation.”