From Calculated Risk: “Recently I’ve been talking to a few friends from around the country, and they all seemed unaware that the California economy is clearly improving. California is seeing a pickup in employment, the delinquency rate is falling, and I wouldn’t be surprised if California reports a balanced budget soon.”
As I’ve said many times before, we’d all like to see these graphs looking stronger, but there was really no plausible scenario for that to happen given the dynamics of the financial crisis, the housing bust, and the collapse in new construction. More stimulus efforts from governments at all levels would have helped, for sure, but any serious effort was politically impossible.
Moments ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the nation added 171,000 jobs in October. That number (like all of those is here) is adjusted for seasonality. And that’s a pretty good number — it suggests that our recovery…
Should the Obama administration have pushed for an even larger stimulus package? It would have helped the economy in the short run but it would have created even more debt.
Could the Obama administration have gotten a larger package through Congress if their numbers had been more accurate from the beginning? I kind of doubt it.
Should the Obama administration have not pushed for a stimulus package at all and just let the economy keep spiraling downward?
I’m not getting into the relative merits of having additional government employees, but it’s a simple fact that governments at all levels have added employees as the nation’s population has increased — and those increases have generally been affected hardly at all by recessions. But this time is different.
“Of course, Obama has no chance of getting a second term in this economy,” my friend said definitively. “And whoever gets elected in 2012 will be a one-term President too.”
Econbrowser has a post up today thoroughly debunking the conspiracy theories surrounding last Friday’s BLS estimate that the unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent last month: Watergate! Iran-Contra! BLS 2012.10.5?
For a much more detailed discussion, go to the following post from Calculated Risk (from which the chart below comes): Understanding the Decline in the Participation Rate. There’s more detailed discussion than I’m offering here, plus a total of five graphs, all of which should be of interest to anyone reading this.
The number of people identifying themselves as unemployed (looking for work but unable to find any) fell by 456,000 over the month.
Does Will understand the difference between “unemployed” and “not employed”? Or is he letting his own biases convince him that we’re actually seeing depression levels of unemployment? Or is he just so bad with numbers that he shouldn’t be using them at all?
There are certainly things that could have been done at the federal level — and to a lesser extent at the state and local levels — that could have softened the decline somewhat and put us on a slightly steeper recovery curve. But most of those potential moves would have been either politically impossible or would have carried other risks.
In my City Talk column last Sunday, I wrote about the declining inventory in the Savannah metro area housing market. We’re still a long way from where we need to be, but the twin trends of fewer new listings and increased sales have steadily whittled the inventory lower and lower, which has helped put a floor under prices.
Note that after every hint or announcement of more Fed action, the S&P came off a recent low.
