Found a place where I could cite to the FT article re Japan’s currency intervention:
Story, what little of it there is, here: http://news.tradingcharts.com/futures/1/2/55420121.html
Sam, not that it’s surprising that you’d look around your favorite RW blogs for sources to back your predetermined conclusion that the recession is Clinton’s fault, or at least not Bush’s, but the Office of Management and Budget for one disagrees with you pretty significantly. The official dates, ones you’ve quoted yourself before IIRC, are a start in March 2001 and an end in November 2001, still before the first Bush budget got out of the blocks. Yes, it was over two and a half years ago, officially, and this is certainly a new record for job growth lag. That is, if it’s real even now, and not just an artifact of military mobilization like last month’s “job growth” number. If you won’t blame Bush for starting the recession, you can’t credit him for ending it either, nor can you use 9/11 as an excuse.
Nitpick: Australia has a lower unemployment rate at the moment than 5.6%
But they are also run by a conservative government who push forward tax cuts and job creation. See a pattern? I do.
The US also had lower unemployment rates than the rest of the world during the Clinton years. Means nothing.
Clinton also struggled with inflation, usually attributed to low unemployment (it is said you cant have one without the other).
Bush will probably have some inflation issues (or the dems) if he gets elected next term. But inflation thats managed a good thing, out of control inflation is a very very very bad thing though :eek:
Or you could say that Clinton did a pretty good job managing the economy. Which he did.
(emphasis added)
Sam, you’re right about everything in this thread, but you’re seriously buggin’ on the cites and the reading comprehension thing. Make you a deal – I’ll be more diligent than usual about following this thread during the week and in exchange, you get some productive sleep and some productive work done and pick up with your usual alacrity on, say, Wednesday. You’ll owe me one. Deal?
Anyone who doesn’t understand that 9/11 had a severe and (in terms of the U.S.) unprecedented negative effect on the economy should seriously be institutionalized for his own protection. Yes, seriously.
As to the other points made recently, I’ll have much more tomorrow (I’ve had a couple beers tonight, and economics on alcohol is a poor idea), but yes, Japan (and to a much greater extent, China) has/have had a pallative effect on long-term rates – there are good macro reasons for them to have done so and in China’s case the trend is likely to continue, but there are risks associated with that – I’ll address those risks and why we’re in that place to begin with. I’ll also address the shape of the yield curve relative to China and Japan, Fed jawboning, inflation expectations, supply of government debt and other factors.
Job growth has been slow, but compared to the relatively small job losses during the recession they haven’t been too bad, particularly if one is a disciple of Alan Greenspan. The eight-month length of the measured recession was, candidly, way too short for the length of the expansion and the size of the bubble which preceded it. I’ll go into some of the possible reasons why.
The measured duration of the recession has indeed been short, but the economy, particularly in terms of job creation, was (and is) weaker than the “recession” numbers indicate precisely because of 9/11 and some of the structural changes to the economy which occurred as a result.
If anyone cares, I’ll even go into U.S. growth relative to European and LDC-country growth and how the expectations of the interplays among them have so far been both confounded and confirmed.
Agh. I meant 1991. Not 2001. We were comparing job creation after the last cycle with this one. You’re right, I need sleep.
I think it’s a sign of how desperate the Bush apologists are when they’re making all this hay about 288,000 jobs in April – while conveniently ignoring the three years worth of job losses that preceeded it.
“Hey, the economy is starting to suck less! Vote Bush!”
Sigh, there you go again Sam. You’ve repeated this incorrect information in other threads and have been corrected before on it. Why do you keep posting it? Doing so won’t make it true. See: http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/04_08/b3871044.htm?mz
Again, this has been covered before in threads that you have been part of. The March job increase was mostly PART-TIME jobs. I haven’t yet seen a comprehensive analysis of the April numbers yet but would be surprised if at least 50% of the newly created jobs weren’t also PART-TIME work. Remember, the BLS counts ANY employment over 1 hour by anyone over 16 as employed. But part-time, low wage and benefit jobs do not help the economy to the same degree that a full-time, decent benefit job does.
You may want to take a look at this LINK (May 2004 report) for a picture of the true state of the economy. One related quote form the Payroll Employment section of the report:
I live in the Silicon Valley area. While there are more jobs being listed than in the past few months, many of these, at least in the technology area, are short-term contracts or selling services, like advertising or training courses. I don’t see many new pure technology jobs these days (in fact when I looked in the local paper under Programmers a couple weeks ago, there weren’t even any jobs in this area, in contrast to before the recession, when there were at least 2 full newspaper pages of jobs in this area!
Lastly, with gas prices hitting new highs seemingly on a daily basis, the little people view doesn’t look that good. If you read the busyness news, you’ll notice that sales of full-size SUV’s were off significantly last month. People vote their pocketbooks and experiences, not esoteric statistics which have been manipulated to look positive. Unless Saudi Arabia succeeds in delivering on their promise to reduce gas prices before the election, this is going to be one of the issues that the low and middle class will be voting on.
Found this short comment on the April job report at http://www.urbansurvival.com/week.htm
SS: *This one is also unfalsifiable, because A) a President really doesn’t have all THAT much power when it comes to shaping an economy, at least in the short-term, and B) The workings of the economy are complex enough that it’s tough to assign cause and effect to things like tax policy. *
I agree, but you need to tell it to the White House. The Administration itself made some very optimistic and definite claims about the positive effects its tax cuts were going to have on job growth. It’s perfectly reasonable to call them on the discrepancies between their prediction and the actual performance:
In other words, the Administration’s own Council of Economic Advisers predicted that the tax cuts would do far, far more for job growth than they actually have. According to the CEA predictions, we’d be doing more than twice as well by now if we hadn’t had the tax cuts at all!
That’s not partisan sniping on the order of “no matter how well we’re doing, it’s Bush’s fault that we’re not doing better”. That’s a completely justifiable observation that the Administration’s “Jobs and Growth Plan” predictions were full of crap and haven’t come anywhere near being fulfilled—nor will they by the end of 2004, unless we get about 4.5 million new jobs by then.
Now, the current uptick in the jobs numbers is indeed heartening, and we all hope it continues, but it still falls far short of what the Administration said their policies would accomplish. And they deserve to be called on that.
Now there are signs of wage inflation due to rapid job creation, increases in material costs, energy costs are skyrocketing, etc.
There are? According to the linked report, although there are indeed indications of inflation in rising prices, we are still seeing decline in the growth of wages:
Down here on the mean streets, I have four family members who are unemployed, three were laid off and one has been searching for work for over a year. Gas prices are at record highs and the country is stacking up debt. Everything is peachy!
Sorry I don’t have any statistics.
I agreed with that. Obviously the economy goes sour well before a recession is officially called.
I do hope the american economy improving, it greatly affects the rest of the world. But I’m not convinced that the latest figures are anything more than corrections in the market.
Longterm, I’m mostly worried about the huge federal budget deficit and the trade deficit
Shortterm, I’m worried about recent news about higher oil prices, as well as news that Japan doesn’t buy as much dollar as they used to. Greenspan has indicated that the interest rate is probably going up later this year.
But what worries me most is that one on hand this “economic downturn” hasn’t been much of a downturn at all - compared to the late eighties and seventhies -; on the other hand, never before has so much money been pumped into the market as with Bush’s tax cuts. Yet, the improvement in the economy has been modest at best, even when the impact of September 11 is factored in. Will the economy manage to take off before the effects of the deficit cathes up with it? Hard to say, IMO.
Let’s just remember that, under eight years of the Clinton-Gore administration, there were 20.8 million new jobs created. Even if the Bush Administration reports an average of 250,000 new jobs created every month between now and November, the sum total for four years of Bush-Cheney won’t even be a quarter of that figure.
And that’s before looking at other factors, such as average salaries, full- or part-time jobs, distorted reporting by the Administration, etc.
I’m thinking you should have some of the warm milk prescribed for Sam. Among the most glaring (and I’ll be extremely charitable to jobwatch) errors in that report is that it referrs to a CEA paper on the President’s proposed economic plan, not the one which was enacted. The enacted plan was half the size of the proposal, and had a notable difference in the treatment of dividends paid from retained earnings – 15% instead of 0.
Additionally, the jobwatch people, uh, failed to remember some of the important qualifying parts of the release – particularly, the risk of “high required rates of
return arising from geopolitical and other risks, and a prolonged period of balance-sheet repair,” both of which happened in spades during 2H03 – balance sheet repair happening mostly with large businesses and high required rates with smaller ones, the traditional engine of new jobs in the American economy.
That said, the CEA report isn’t without its own faults. The main one is the one that pretty much everyone has made – that the economy could grow at the rate it did for as long as it did without new jobs. Essentially, everyone underestimated the amount of productivity which could be wrung out of the system by businesses scared to hire. I’ll leave CEA’s claim that GDP would be increased by the plan to the politicians to argue, but the fact is that GDP growth was very good in 2H03. Heck, even prior to the later stimulus plan, and ignoring whether any stimulus plan, tax or spending driven, had this or that effect, if someone told me at the beginning of 2002 that the economy would grow at 8.5+ percent in nominal terms and 5+% in real terms over the following two years and that the job market response would be bupkes, I’d have said that he’s nuts. Heck, even with the good job numbers in March, the first quarter still saw productivity up 4.5 percent overall and up 5.9% in durable goods manufacturing, that home of the “good-paying” jobs (but see below).
As for wages, the news has been mostly bad for the recovery through 2003 but turned decidedly positive in 2004 – I forgot to bring the precise stats with me, so I’ll have to get them later.
Finally, the pay division between service jobs and manufacturing jobs just doesn’t exist. Sure, an autoworker makes more than a burger flipper. But broadly, during April the average manufacturing job paid $15.24/hour, $16.08 after overtime. Service jobs as a group paid $15.17. Service jobs ex-retail and leisure (where the burger-flippers and clerks are) paid $17.25/hr. During the past several months, more than half the jobs created have been in those categories of service jobs which pay better than the median. There do continue to exist important (but shrinking) differences between the two categories in terms of pension plans and some other things, but sadly, those differences don’t seem to drive people’s near-term economic decisions and are fodder for an entirely different thread.
Job creation over the last few months has, as noted by many, been excellent. However, by the Bush Administrations projections we are doing abominably horrid on job creation. Incomprehensibly, mind bogglingly horrid.
Late 2001 (post 9/11) the Administration projected that at the end of this year (Bush’s first term) we would have approximately 5.5-6 million jobs over the employment levels at the beginning of his administration, due to his tax cuts. Throughout 2002 employment fell.
Late 2002/beginning 2003 the administration projected that at the end of this year employment would be up approximately 3 million from the levels at the beginning of 2001, due to Bush’s tax cuts. Throughout 2003 employment fell.
Late 2003/beginning 2004 the administration projected that employment would be somewhat over that at the beginning of the Bush administration. Within a month they had repudiated the report as meaningless, replacing it with projections of 400,000 jobs generated a month.
http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/000146.html
A case can certainly be made that the economy is recovering (IIRC a couple of indices are less than thrilling, but I’m happy with any good economic news at this point). To claim that the recovery (and not the extended recession) is due to Bush’s tax cuts requires that the Bush administration be mendacious, incompetent, or both.
Lets hope the recovery continues.
Blah blah blah. :rolleyes:
Let us also remember that it was a fucking bubble. . Not a sustainable economic expansion. Based on a house of cards. A falsehood. Why is not suprising that you would pine for the days of a phoney expansion?
Pssst…
That was just the dot.coms…
A very small part of the economy.
Do you really think all the jobs were created in the dot.coms?
Wanna buy a bridge?
A Cisco bridge? (sorry, couldn’t resist.)