The Great Debate

– Peter Morici is a Professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, and former Chief Economist at the United States International Trade Commission. The views –

The economy continues to bleed jobs, even as GDP rebounds. Employment may be a lagging indicator, but job losses should have abated by now even if a lot of new jobs are not being added.

Coming off a deep recession, GDP growth should have been much stronger than the 2.8 percent recorded in the third quarter. A poorly conceived and badly executed stimulus package and the failure to correct structural problems that caused the Great Recession are holding down growth.

Consequently, the economy is not creating jobs, and certainly not creating good paying, full-time jobs with benefits.

Friday, the Labor Department will report employment data for November. In October, the economy lost 190,000 jobs, and the consensus forecast is for another 100,000 jobs lost in November.

– Matthew Goldstein is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own –

Many critics of the Securities and Exchange Commission point to Christopher Cox’s appointment as chairman in August 2005 as the day the wheels came off Wall Street’s top cop.

But in some ways, the SEC began to veer off course a few months earlier, when the agency moved its Washington headquarters into a sparkling new office building that would make even a corporate law firm jealous.