President Obama’s selection of Alan Krueger as the new chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) comes as the president prepares to launch a jobs program to tame a 9.1% unemployment rate that could thwart his …
Economy
Stay In School, Kids: A Look At Unemployment By Education
Things are bad, but they are much worse if you didn’t go to college. Below is a quick rendering of the U.S. unemployment rate, as a percentage of total working population, for people over the age of 25 with different levels of educational attainment. As you can see, this economic collapse has only made the spreads scarier. Want a job? …
What Washington Can — and Won’t — Do About Market Fears
The 6% stock-market sell-off on Monday elicited hopes from Wall Street that Washington would do something to reassure the world that it is serious about its mounting debt and determined to reinvigorate the stalled recovery. …
Standard & Poor’s Embarrassing U.S. Debt Downgrade
S&P’s downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt from AAA to AA+ though symbolically and politically powerful, was already destined to be met with skepticism in New York and DC. The fact that the beleaguered rating agency managed to make …
Washington and the Global Economic Rout
I’m wary of causal leaps, but here’s Steve Gandel explaining the worldwide market plunge and why Washington’s little debt ceiling pirouette didn’t help:
So far this week we have gotten economic reports that show spending by consumers and manufacturing activity have both been falling recently. Around the world overall inflation is
…
The Debt Limit Compromise: A Likely Short-Term Drag on Jobs
Exit polls from last November’s midterms left little ambiguity about the issue that motivated most voters: 63% listed “the economy” as the most important issue. When asked the top priority for Congress in 2011, only 40% said “reducing the budget deficit,” while 55% said “cutting taxes” or “spending money to create …
The Real American Crisis: Housing
While everyone focuses on the pathetic, dangerous political theater of the fabricated debt ceiling crisis, here’s a crisis that is actually responsible for the stunted recovery. Bank of America has joined Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and others in bulldozing homes to reduce the housing supply. It is the latest indication of how desperate …
Cut, Cap And Balance: Not About Jobs in the Short Term
Here is a Washington truism for 2011: It’s all about jobs, except when it is not, which is most of the time.
House Republicans are about to put their deficit cutting plan on the table, a snappy sounding piece of legislation …
Obama More Pessimistic on the Economy, But Not Pessimistic Enough
“Headwinds” from the first half of 2011 are holding back the recovery, President Obama and his advisers argued on Friday, reacting to an undeniably abysmal June jobs report. While Obama didn’t dismiss the discouraging data as a “bump in the road to recovery” as he did in May, the White House is trying to blame transitory factors such as …
June Jobs Number Threatens Debt Talks — and Obama
Friday morning’s miserable jobs report delivered a blunt-force blow to Obama’s overall economic approach and posed a serious threat to the country’s recovery. More immediately, it complicates the President’s already difficult debt ceiling negotiations with Speaker John Boehner by adding an urgent priority: getting another stealth …
Should Obama Defend the Recovery at All?
Stanley Greenberg, the Democratic pollster who helped elect President Bill Clinton, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and Israel’s Ehud Barak, says all of his clients have had the same, sometimes terrible, instinct: “They want to …
Economic Reality
Here’s a quote to start the day from the New York Times:
“I want to have as few people touching our products as possible,” said Dan Mishek, managing director of Vista Technologies in Vadnais Heights, Minn. “Everything should be as automated as it can be. We just can’t afford to compete with countries like China on labor costs,
…
For More Stimulus, Obama Has a Tough Sell and a Narrow Window
As I report in this week’s magazine, several current and former advisers to President Obama would like Congress to pass more short-term stimulus, but no one inside is quite saying that publicly just yet. “I don’t have any new …