Asian Americans hit hardest by long-term unemployment
Asian Americans have the highest rate of long-term joblessness of any ethnicity in the United States, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington.
Last year marked the second year in a row that Asian Americans had the largest share of unemployed workers who were unemployed long term (i.e., for six months or more). In 2011, 50.1 percent of the Asian American unemployed were unemployed long term, up from 48.7 percent in 2010. In both of these years, the Asian American share slightly exceeded the African American share.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other central bank officials have argued long-term unemployment is an enormous challenge, but have been reluctant to apply additional monetary stimulus to the problem. In March, Bernanke said:
Although most spells of unemployment are disruptive or costly, the persistently high rate of long-term unemployment we have seen over the past three years or so is especially concerning.
Jobs or inflation — Is the Fed distracted?
The Federal Reserve doesn’t get much love from Washington these days but it did receive a rare bit of political backing on Wednesday as Democrats defended its role in promoting full employment as well as stable prices.
The U.S. central bank has been the target of criticism from members of both political parties as a result of bank bailouts and hands-off rule-enforcement that let predatory and unsound lending practices go unchecked, among other shortfalls.
But discussing legislation narrowing the Fed’s mandate to a single-minded focus on price stability, Democrats questioned the need to drop the full employment side of the dual mandate.
“Is it a problem?” asked Minnesotan Keith Ellison. “To the degree that we have problems with monetary policy, is the dual mandate the cause?”
Ellison said that far from distracting the Fed, the lofty 8.1 percent unemployment rate should get greater attention. “This is a national disgrace,” he said.
Ron Paul, a presidential candidate who chairs a subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, held a hearing to discuss several pieces of legislation changing the Fed’s mandate. Two of these would limit the Fed’s focus to price stability.
With partisan divisions and other priorities, Congress is unlikely to make any changes to the Fed’s mandate this year. But the effort could gain momentum if Republicans control both houses of Congress after November.
The Feds don’t control credit unions, that’s why I moved my money. That and the fact that they actually pay you interest on your savings!
An upward bias in jobless claims revisions
Weekly data on applications for unemployment benefits have gained renewed importance since a weak March payrolls number left economists wondering whether a tentative labor market recovery was about to cave again. The last two weeks’ readings were just soft enough to leave investors thinking the country’s unemployment crisis may not be healing very quickly.
Daniel Silver at JP Morgan has dug deeper into the claims figures and found a curious trend: a repeated and distinctive tendency toward upward revisions in the numbers.
There has not been a downward revision to the initial claims data reported for the prior week since the start of March 2011, and this recent streak is not a new phenomenon—there have been upward revisions in about 90% of the weekly reports since the start of 2008, as well as going back even further to the start of 2000. These revisions are relatively minor (usually adding only a few thousand claims) and do not change the broader trends in the data, but they can lead to the weekly claims reports showing decreases to the more recent levels, whereas if the prior week had been unrevised, the reports would have shown increases in claims.
What is the reason behind this? Silver identifies two possible sources: backdated claims and interstate applications, which take an extra week before they make it into the report.
As for what happened in the latest week — claims were revised up by 8,000 to 388,000. That’s just teetering around the level that economists believe separates an improving labor market from a deteriorating one.
What have a trillion euros done for the economic outlook? Not much yet
The trillion euro sugar rush that made Q1 the best start to the year for global stocks in more than a decade has already worn off, but what is most striking is not how quickly it ended. It’s how little the economic outlook has changed.
Cheap central bank money mainly seems to have boosted stocks and the optimism of stock market forecasters, who generally are the most bullish of the lot with or without wads of cheap money.
An analysis of Reuters Polls over the past three months, starting just before the European Central Bank made the first of two gargantuan injections of cheap three-year money into the banking system, reveals what many have fretted might happen.
Derived from professional market forecasters and economists, they showed that the cash would probably do a lot to push up asset prices in the short term but do little to help a stalled euro zone economy with rising unemployment.
The consensus for Q1 euro zone GDP has stagnated at a quarterly contraction of 0.2 percent in the past three monthly Reuters polls, starting from the December poll, taken before the ECB’s first of two long-term refinancing operations (LTROs).
Over the same period, the outlook for 2012 growth as a whole deteriorated from none at all to a mild 0.3 percent contraction.
Frankfurt’s DAX had its best Q1 since 1998, up a staggering 18 percent. European shares more broadly rose 7 percent – still, the kind of return an investor might hope to get during a good year, not three months.
Cheap central bank money mainly seems to have boosted stocks and the optimism of stock market forecasters
houch!!
the problem is that this money must be repaid in three years
look to market capitalization of spain italy portugal ecc..
in europe there is a lot of people with losses of 30 50% on share prices in their portfolio “wealth effect” is a good boost for consumers investors ecc.
Hysterical about hysteresis
Economists at times fancy themselves scientists – and they like to borrow from scientific lingo to lend their theories some extra gravitas.
The U.S. unemployment crisis is a case in point. There is a long-running debate among economists as to whether the bulk of joblessness is cyclical, resulting from a lack of demand in a depressed phase of the business cycle, or structural, the product of more fundamental issues such as skills mismatches. The latter problem is more intractable, economists say, and less amenable to treatment via an easy monetary policy.
Nearly three years into the economic recovery, the jobless rate remains at a historically elevated 8.2 percent. Moreover, the economy has only made up about 3.6 million of the nearly 9 million lost during the recession. Against this backdrop, there is widespread concern that the U.S. economy might soon reach a point of what economists call (and here’s where the science comes in) “hysteresis.” In physics, the concept is defined as follows:
The retardation of an effect when the forces acting upon a body are changed (as if from viscosity or internal friction); especially : a lagging in the values of resulting magnetization in a magnetic material (as iron) due to a changing magnetizing force.
In economics, the term refers to the possibility that prolonged periods of cyclical joblessness, if left unchecked, could become structural as workers skills are eroded and their attachment to the labor force fades.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke highlighted that risk in a recent speech to business economists:
If progress in reducing unemployment is too slow, the long-term unemployed will see their skills and labor force attachment atrophy further, possibly converting a cyclical problem into a structural one.
A worker is a terrible thing to waste
How bad is the U.S. employment situation? The Labor Department’s tally for March, which showed only 120,000 new jobs were created, raised doubts about the sustainability of a recent pick up in job growth. But to get a broader sense of what things are really like it helps to put things in a longer-term perspective.
Even with the 3.6 million new jobs created during the recovery, some 5 million more are needed just to make up for all of the jobs that were lost during the Great Recession. At March’s pace, it would take nearly four more years to get there – and that’s not accounting for population growth.
If job growth remains at tepid clip of around 150,000 a month, it would take five years for the jobless rate, which registered 8.2 percent in March, to fall to 6 percent, according to Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank economist Julie Hotchkiss.
Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research says that, while the March figure very likely reflects some payback for the stronger activity seen during the earlier months of an unusually warm winter, the long term outlook remains bleak.
The weaker job growth in the March data is primarily an artifact of the weather. However the 212,000 average job gain over the last three months is not especially strong. It implies a return to full employment some time in 2019.
Bernanke’s jobs pivot
Jason Lange contributed to this post
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made no direct references to the outlook for monetary policy in a speech to the National Association for Business Economics on Monday. But the message from his heavy focus on a weak labor market was pretty clear: The Fed is not considering tightening policy in the near future and stands ready to do more if growth doesn’t pick up steam this year. Ironically, Bernanke’s pessimism cheered the markets – by signaling that another round of stimulus is not off the table.
Andrew Wilkinson at Miller Tabak captured Bernanke’s feat for the day:
It ain’t what you say it’s the way that you say it – at least that’s what Chairman Bernanke found out on Monday by not mentioning further quantitative easing.
After its last two meetings, the Fed said it would likely keep rates near zero at least through late 2014. But upbeat economic signs, including solid employment growth, have led investors to bet on a move as early as the middle of next year. Bernanke’s speech appeared aimed at pushing back against those expectations.
Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, reacted to the speech on the sidelines of the NABE conference.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like he’s pushing the ball forward towards having a discussion about doing more.
Lower future jobless rate may give Fed little comfort
While Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was noting the recent strengthening of the U.S. job market is “out of sync” with an otherwise slow recovery on Monday, economists at the New York Fed drew attention to the jobless rate itself by saying that some big changes lie ahead for U.S. labor.
The jobless rate may fall faster than expected to less than 5 percent in five years’ time, the economists said in the first in a series of posts but that seems likely to be due more to the fact that fewer people will be in the labor market than to future job creation.
The post notes how, between 2008 and 2012, the employment to-population ratio had a different pattern than in previous economic cycles, with the unemployment rate falling “because the participation rates declined substantially”. Given the U.S. aging population, with 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 each day, this rate is likely to decline even more. The argument has interesting implications, including a potential decline in the usefulness of the jobless rate as a gauge of well-being.
If the employment-to-population ratio continues to be sluggish as the unemployment rate declines (suggesting that flows to nonparticipation are important in driving the unemployment rate decline), then the unemployment rate will emerge as an increasingly less reliable measure of the health of the labor market.
If so, what will Fed officials look at when defining its future policies?
Employer of last resort, Arab Spring style
The concept that the government should serve as an employer of last resort in times of economic stress was first floated by the late economist Hyman Minsky. Its modern-day proponents remain largely marginalized, despite the nation’s persistently high unemployment and the extreme damage to the job market that was done by the deepest recession in generations.
But Ali Kadri, senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, argues the policy, which works as an automatic stabilizer when economies are struggling, is all the more appropriate for an Arab world that has been plagued by extremely high joblessness and a general lack of infrastructure and development. He says the Arab spring creates an opportunity for a drastic shift in the region’s approach to social and economic policy.
The retention of resources and their redeployment within the national economy are indispensable conditions for development and job creation. Employment policies are best set subject to social efficiency criteria distinct from the salient neoclassical productivity ones. It is highly unlikely, in view of the sheer smallness to which industry and the productive economy have shrunk under neoliberalism, that it would be possible to reemploy the massive redundant labour force on the basis of expanding private sector expansion and productivity gains. A criterion valuing and remunerating social work may be costly in the short term, but the social returns will reimburse initial expenses over the long term.
Notwithstanding the reductionist nature of the neoclassical criterion of efficiency, equity, in an Arab context of war and oil, must precede any received criteria for efficiency. More egalitarian rent, land and resource distributions redressing the dispossession of the working population during the neoliberal age represent the necessary conditions for effective demand enhancement and a successful development strategy. In practical terms, the state has to act as the employer of last resort (Minsky’s ELR) creating socially relevant and public sector employment. Increasing-returns industry and a granting of preferential status to regional capital and labour are also required. In view of the instability besetting capital accumulation, a regional security arrangement bolstered by working class security and substantiating autonomy over policy can underwrite long-term employment generating investment
Mid-Atlantic headwinds for U.S. employment
Ed Krudy contributed to this post
The Philadelphia Fed’s Mid-Atlantic manufacturing survey covers a pretty small chunk of an already shrunken U.S. factory sector. Still, analysts at Harris Bank have found that the survey’s employment component has been a pretty solid leading indicator of the monthly payrolls figures.
If the trend persists, then February’s report could be a bit of a letdown following a surprisingly robust gain of 243,000 jobs last month. The Philly Fed’s employment index dropped sharply in February to its lowest level since August.
According to Jack Ablin, Harris Bank’s chief investment officer:
For the last several months, the Business Outlook survey has been a keen predictor of the monthly change in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ non-farm payroll. The survey came close to nailing last month’s 243,000 gain, even though economists expected a 140,000 pickup on average. Should the survey’s predictive power continue, investors could be disappointed with February’s BLS report. The Philly Fed survey implies roughly 50,000 net new non-farm payroll jobs added in February. Positive yes, but it would be a big momentum killer. Stay tuned. The payroll report is not due out until March 9th.
