Customer Satisfaction Ratings for Cable TV and Internet are not Good

Almost all the Cable TV providers got the lowest scores possible for value. Customers seems always dissatisfied with pay TV and Internet providers, they consistently receive poor ratings. Most of the complaint are rising monthly bills, poor customer service and little flexibility in packages. It has plagued major players like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and others.

In the latest Consumer Reports survey, it asked customers to rate TV, Internet, and phone services, as well as bundled packages, and the ratings for value was so bad 38 out of the 39 Internet services, and 20 out of the 24 TV providers, received the lowest possible scores possible and 19 out of the 20 bundles have also received poor scores.

Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications are in the bottom of the pack along with Comcast.

Here's the report

U.S. jobless claims Up to 274,000

US citizens who are filing new claims for unemployment benefits went up last week. The initial jobless claims went up by 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted 274,000 in the week ended May 16 according to the Labor Department. The forecast was 271,000.

Fed rate hike likely in June According to Policymakers

- Fed have 2 more months of data before next meeting
- Williams: Don't want to be locked into set pace of rate hikes
- Markets are discounting June rate hike, see December likely

The Federal Reserve is likey to raise interest rates this coming June, according to 2 top US central bankers last Friday. As long as economic data strengthens as expected from a dismal first quarter. It came from the hawkish-leaning chief of the Cleveland Fed and from the centrist head of the San Francisco Fed.

The Fed has maintained the interest rates near zero since December 2008. The key, both Loretta Mester, president of the Cleveland Fed, and John Williams, president of the San Francisco Fed, said, is that by a quirk of the calendar there will be two more months of data for many of the key gauges the Fed follows, including the US jobless rate, jobs gains, retail sales and others. All scheduled Fed policy meetings, including the next one, in June, are "on the table," Mester told reporters in Philadelphia. "There are a whole bunch of data releases that will come out between now and June. But to me the employment reports will be indicative of a lot."

The US economy's weak winter performance, including near-zero growth in gross domestic product, has pushed back market expectations for a policy tightening to September or December, when key Fed meetings are also scheduled. Yet the Fed has telegraphed a rate hike this year, and unemployment, at 5.5 percent, is not too far from what many economists believe represents full employment.

"I agree with the way my colleague Loretta Mester put it," Williams told reporters after a speech at Chapman University, repeating Mester's phrase that all meetings are "on the table." "Really positive data trends, improvement in the labor market, signs that improve the confidence and the expectation that inflation will move back to 2 percent - I mean could imagine that constellation of data coming in, whether before June or meetings right after that too," Williams said. "But that would require the data to be good."

Both Mester and Williams pointed to recent data showing inflation may be firming, suggested they are gaining confidence it is heading toward the Fed's 2 percent target. Looking beyond the Fed's first rate hike, Williams said the US central bank should put some "space" between the start of policy normalization and the decision to allow the Fed's giant balance sheet to shrink.