“In all likelihood, employment will begin to increase more quickly before long as output continues to expand.”
Alan Greenspan Speech to Omaha Chamber of Commerce
February 20, 2004
“Nonfarm employment was little changed (+21,000) in February, and the unemployment rate remained at 5.6 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Employment levels in most of the major industries were little changed over the month.”
Bureau of Labor Statistics News Release
March 5, 2004
“In all likelihood, employment will begin to increase more quickly before long as output continues to expand.”
Are you pitting him for using the same line in his Omaha speech and his testimony to Congress? You don’t like that his forecast didn’t change in two or three weeks? It bothers you that he was consistent in his appraisal?
Toward the end of February and at the beginning of March he said that jobs would increase relatively soon in the future. In between, someone released the employment results for February.
Unfortunately, I’m on my way to work when the figures come out, at 8:30 in the morning on the first Friday of the month. But I would dearly love to see what Larry Kudlow, a thoroughly useless fool that CNBC uses as their chief economist or something, does every month when these figures come out. He’s been predicting a boom ever since Bush made the White House. A more loyal and more stupid 'Pubbie doesn’t exist. (Also a thoroughly vomitacious war-monger: he seriously proposed regime change in Brazil, Venezuela, Libya, and maybe some other places I don’t remember anymore shortly after the Iraq war. What a maroon.)
Well, I dunno about Greenspan, RTFirefly, but this economy is leaving me feeling like a pig shat in my head. There must and will be aspirins…
The OP and my response are “Withnail & I” references.
Well, the reference to the old adaga “A broken clock is right twice a day” made me think the OP was speculating that Greenspan may be “broken”. The specifics of the OP don’t seem that interesting, Greenspan is charged with stewardship of the economy in longer-term timeframes than a couple of weeks. His prognosis not changing for such a short timeframe doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is that his analysis, and moreover the Fed’s behavior, may be creating another bubble. Analysis by other economists, including Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, seems far less upbeat than Greenspan’s comments. I think Greenspan may be using the very fact that his statements are taken as canon to bolster consumer confidence and keep cash flowing when it may be better for the individual to stabilize what they’ve got. The “recovery” seems more based on growth because of the absurdly low interest rates than on sustainable growth. I wonder what will happen when the prime rate goes up. I worry about what will happen when the prime rate goes up. But at the moment I see the Fed and Greenspan as race car drivers white-knuckling the wheel and trying their best to put the pedal through the floor. I’m not sure it is either enough or sustainable, and the fact that it is continuing is very troubling. I’m wondering if the Maestro has finally lost it.