…but that doesn’t mean the overall employment picture will get a lot worse.
From today’s “Breakfast with Dave” e-mail:
There are serious structural issues undermining the U.S. labour market as companies continue to adjust their order books, production schedules and staffing requirements to a semi-permanently impaired credit backdrop. The bottom line is that the level of credit per unit of GDP is going to be much, much lower in the future than has been the case in the last two decades. While we may be getting close to a bottom in terms of employment, the jobless rate is very likely going to be climbing much further in the future due to the secular dynamics within the labour market.
But in a nutshell, to be calling for a 12.0-13.0% unemployment rate is meaningless except that it is very likely going to be a headline grabber. The most inclusive definition of them all, the U6 measure of the unemployment rate, which includes all forms of unemployed and underemployed, is already at 17.5%. The posted U3 jobless rate that everyone focuses on is at 10.2% (though if it weren’t for the drop in the labour force participation rate, to 65.1% from 66.0% a year ago, the unemployment rate would be testing the post-WWII high of 10.8% right now). The gap between the U6 and the official U3 rate is at a record 7.3 percentage points. Normally this spread is between 3-4 percentage points and ultimately we will see a reversion to the mean, to some unhappy middle where the U6 may be closer to 15.0-16.0% and the posted jobless rate closer to 12%. This will undoubtedly be a major political issue, especially in the context of a mid-term elections and the GOP starting to gain some electoral ground.
Think about it. We haven’t yet hit bottom on employment but that will happen at some point. Employment is not going to zero, of that we can assure you. But when we do start to see the economic clouds part in a more decisive fashion, what are employers likely to do first? Well, naturally they will begin to boost the workweek and just getting back to pre-recession levels would be the same as hiring more than two million people. Then there are the record number of people who got furloughed into part-time work and again, they total over nine million, and these folks are not counted as unemployed even if they are working considerably fewer days than they were before the credit crunch began.
So the business sector has a vast pool of resources to draw from before they start tapping into the ranks of the unemployed or the typical 100,000-125,000 new entrants into the labour force when the economy turns the corner. Hence the unemployment rate is going to very likely be making new highs long after the recession is over — perhaps even years.
This last bit explains why the cyclical pressures on inflation are likely to stay low for some time. But wage-push isn’t the kind of inflation we need to be worried about.
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Success brings profit; failure brings loss. If that’s a fundamental tenant then it has been profoundly violated.
Error #1 – Excessive credit expansion has brought an economic explosion that resulted in huge failures. America economic managers have deliberately allowed this to happen after 2000.
Error #2 – Much of financial failures were covered up, by transferring them to the government books. This was the deliberate act of Hank Paulson and Congress.
Error #3 – With the government books, which are already loaded in giant debt, bloated in further debt, it now tries to hide it by setting basic interest rate to zero. This is a deliberate Fed policy of Bernanke.
#1-#3 are nothing more than bailouts and cover-ups. The grand managers who were responsible for explosions tried to stabilize the explosion. This game of hiding has now reached a stage of no-more-buck-passing. Interest rate must be maintained at zero because any attempt to raise it will blow up the government and the economy further. This is the Japan Black Hole. It can last for decades – the Lost Decades.
So there you have it. America squandered the benefits of USSR collapse, did not learn from Japan post-bubble mistakes, and destroyed its own industrial base for the quick money. It refused to accept the same painful measures it, under the arm of the IMF, dosed out to Asian countries who blew up in the 1998 Asia Economic Crisis.
What arrogance, what disregard for sound economics, what irresponsibility to current and future generations! What betrayal to the millions who hold trillions of America bonds. If this is capitalism, America version, then no country in their right mind will want to adopt it. America richly deserves the gift of the economic black hole.