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I was up early this morning to go to a second-grade program for grandson #2. When I got out and went to the office, I checked the BLS site like I have at 8:30 A.M. Central time on the first Friday of the month for the monthly labor report just like I have for the last 20 years (before that for fifteen years I had to wait for my copy of the Monthly Labor Report to arrive cuz that's what we did before the internets). It was pretty much what I had expected; no big deal. Then I checked CNN.
The Dow was off 275 at the open and had erased all of the gains for the entire year. News commentators were having a cow about the labor report! WTF! I mean where have these people been the last five years? What part of "inadequate stimulus"="lack of effective demand"="economy in the toilet" do they not understand?
Sure the recovery has been very fragile and we are sliding into another recession; but this isn't news. Everyone with more than four brain cells had figured this out. So the unemployment rate ticked up from 8.1% to 8.2%, the first uptick in eleven months. So the current 69,000 new jobs was anemic and March and April job growth was corrected to show jobs growing at half the rate of the previous three months. This is news when the stimulus is over and government is cutting jobs by the thousands? The really scary jobs report was earlier in the ten year forecast for jobs growth by sector and industry. The projected 10 year increase is about 20 million jobs with all but two sectors show an increase. The projected losers are manufacturing (25,000 jobs lost) and the federal government (372,000 job loss).
But I digress.
On the bright side, some folks are dumber and worse off than we are. The 17 nation Eurozone decided austerity was a good idea, and they have 11% unemployment (over 20% in Spain etc.) and are headed for a break-up.
Shit! We have tried this experiment before. It was called the Great Depression and gave us among other goodies National Socialism and World War II. Krugman is right; economists seem to have forgotten what they learned about macroeconomics over sixty years ago. Either that or more likely quite a few have been simply bought off.
Anyway, I am feeling much better now. That doesn't mean that I think the economy is going to get any better; I don't and it won't. I'm in a country where 47% of the population claims to believe in Creationism and then doesn't understand why their kids do so poorly in science. Sheesh.
Well I hope you are enjoying the Depression, it looks like it won't end soon. I don't believe in economic forecasts more than five year out and I don't see anyone reputable predicting a healthy economy in that time frame. Maybe 2020?
Jamie
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"Now I troll back to my little cave where we no talk about things we no understand..." Malfalda
"Ummmm. Roadkill."
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