Jeffrey Snider comments on last week’s Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report:
It is for once a payroll report more like the actual economy. It may be improving after having spent several years slowing, but it does so at so far an incredibly lethargic pace. Thus, the overall economy is left off worse for having undergone the slowdown in the first place, as the cost in time only increases while stuck in this condition.
What I mean is the incredible lack of momentum and acceleration. Even where and when negative pressures abate, that is the only positive force seemingly at work – the lack of further decline, or in the case of labor slowing. It is an odd state unlike anything else, where the only two conditions are either negative or not negative. The idea of actual growth is foreign. To my mind that is the essence of what would be a depression, but most people are conditioned to believe that word applies only to something like 1929.
Whatever the technical or colloquial term, the substance of it clearly remains to be repeated back and forth, slowing and not slowing. Growth and expansion are at 4.4% unemployment still absent.
It’s too bad that politics is focused on personal and political gain while policy takes a back seat. Otherwise we might actually have some policies that comport with the circumstances as they are.
