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Trouble Ahead

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I find it very amusing that we are being bombarded with so many absurd election year “talking points” and none of them concern the risk of a 2012 economic recession.  The entire world seems in denial about a global problem which is about to hit everyone over the head.  I’m reminded of the odd brainstorming session in September of 2008, when Presidential candidates Obama and McCain were seated at the same table with a number of econ-honchos, all of whom were scratching their heads in confusion about the financial crisis.  Something similar is about to happen again.  You might expect our leaders to be smart enough to avoid being blindsided by an adverse economic situation – again – but this is not a perfect world.  It’s not even a mediocre world.

After two rounds of quantitative easing, the Kool-Aid drinkers are sipping away, in anticipation of the “2012 bull market”.  Even the usually-bearish Doug Kass recently enumerated ten reasons why he expects the stock market to rally “in the near term”.  I was more impressed by the reaction posted by a commenter – identified as “Skateman” at the Pragmatic Capitalism blog.  Kass’ reason #4 is particularly questionable:

Mispaced preoccupation with Europe:  The European situation has improved.   .  .  .

Skateman’s reaction to Kass’ reason #4 makes more sense:

The Europe situation has not improved.  There is no escape from ultimate disaster here no matter how the deck chairs are rearranged.  Market’s just whistling past the graveyard.

Of particular importance was this recent posting by Mike Shedlock (a/k/a Mish), wherein he emphasized that “without a doubt Europe is already in recession.”  After presenting his readers with the most recent data supporting his claim, Mish concluded with these thoughts:

Telling banks to lend in the midst of a deepening recession with numerous austerity measures yet to kick in is simply absurd.  If banks did increase loans, it would add to bank losses.  The smart thing for banks to do is exactly what they are doing, parking cash at the ECB.

Austerity measures in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and France combined with escalating trade wars ensures the recession will be long and nasty.

*   *   *

Don’t expect the US to be immune from a Eurozone recession and a Chinese slowdown.  Unlike 2011, it will not happen again.

Back on October 8, Jeff Sommer wrote an article for The New York Times, discussing the Economic Cycle Research Institute’s forecast of another recession:

“If the United States isn’t already in a recession now it’s about to enter one,” says Lakshman Achuthan, the institute’s chief operations officer.  It’s just a forecast.  But if it’s borne out, the timing will be brutal, and not just for portfolio managers and incumbent politicians.  Millions of people who lost their jobs in the 2008-9 recession are still out of work.  And the unemployment rate in the United States remained at 9.1 percent in September.  More pain is coming, says Mr. Achuthan.  He thinks the unemployment rate will certainly go higher.  “I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes back up into double digits,” he says.

Mr. Achuthan’s outlook was echoed by economist John Hussman of the Hussman Funds, who pointed out in his latest Weekly Market Comment that investors have been too easily influenced by recent positive economic data such as payroll reports and Purchasing Managers Indices:

I can understand this view in the sense that the data points are correct – economic data has come in above expectations for several weeks, the Chinese, European and U.S. PMI’s have all ticked higher in the latest reports, new unemployment claims have declined, and December payrolls grew by 200,000.

Unfortunately, in all of these cases, the inference being drawn from these data points is not supported by the data set of economic evidence that is presently available, which is instead historically associated with a much more difficult outcome.  Specifically, the data set continues to imply a nearly immediate global economic downturn.  Lakshman Achuthan of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) has noted if the U.S. gets through the second quarter of this year without falling into recession, “then, we’re wrong.”  Frankly, I’ll be surprised if the U.S. gets through the first quarter without a downturn.

At the annual strategy seminar held by Société Générale, their head of strategy – Albert Edwards – attracted quite a bit of attention with his grim prognostications.  The Economist summarized his remarks this way:

The surprise message for investors is that he feels the US is on the brink of another recession, despite the recent signs of optimism in the data (the non-farm payrolls, for example).  The recent temporary boost to consumption is down to a fall in the household savings ratio, which he thinks is not sustainable.

Larry Elliott of The Guardian focused on what Albert Edwards had to say about China and he provided more detail concerning Edwards’ remarks about the United States:

“There is a likelihood of a China hard landing this year.  It is hard to think 2013 and onwards will be any worse than this year if China hard-lands.”

*   *   *

He added that despite the recent run of more upbeat economic news from the United States, the risk of another recession in the world’s biggest economy was “very high”.  Growth had slowed to an annual rate of 1.5% in the second and third quarters of 2011, below the “stall speed” that historically led to recession.  It was unlikely that the economy would muddle through, Edwards said.

So there you have it.  The handwriting is on the wall.  Ignore it at your peril.


 

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Magic Numbers

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As soon as I got a look at the March Nonfarm Payrolls Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on April 1, I knew that the cheerleaders from the “rose-colored glasses” crowd would be trumpeting the onset of some sort of new era, or “golden age”.  I wasn’t too far off.  My own reaction to the BLS report was similar to that expressed by Bill McBride of Calculated Risk:

The March employment report was another small step in the right direction, but the overall employment situation remains grim:  There are 7.25 million fewer payroll jobs now than before the recession started in 2007 with 13.5 million Americans currently unemployed.  Another 8.4 million are working part time for economic reasons, and about 4 million more workers have left the labor force.  Of those unemployed, 6.1 million have been unemployed for six months or more.

Nevertheless, the opening words of the BLS report, asserting that nonfarm payroll employment increased by 216,000 in March, were all that the cheerleaders wanted to hear.  My cynicism about the unjustified enthusiasm was shared by economist Dean Baker:

Okay, this celebration around the jobs report is really getting out of hand.  Both the Post and Times had front page pieces touting the good news.  The Post gets the award for being the more breathless of the two   .   .   .

Brad DeLong had some fun letting the air out of the party balloons floating around in a brief piece by Gregory Ip of The Economist.  Mr. Ip began with this happy thought:

TURN off the alarms.  After several weeks when the data pointed to a recovery still struggling to achieve escape velocity, the March employment report provided reassuring evidence that, at a minimum, it is still gaining altitude.

After completely deconstructing Mr. Ip’s essay by emphasizing the painfully not-so-happy undercurrents lurking within the piece (apparently included out of concern that the Federal Reserve might take away the Quantitative Easing crack pipe) Professor DeLong re-visited Ip’s initial statement in the sobering light of day:

There is “recovery” in a sense that the output gap and the employment gap are no longer shrinking — and so that real GDP is growing at the rate of growth of potential output.  But this is not reason to “turn off the alarms.”  This is not reason to talk about “pieces [of recovery] … falling into place.”  And I am not sure I would describe this as “gaining altitude” with respect to the state of the business cycle.

The exploitation of the March Nonfarm Payrolls Report for bolstering claims that economic conditions are better than they really are is just the latest example of how the beauty of a given statistic can exist in the eye of the beholder – depending on the context in which that statistic is presented.   Economist David J. Merkel recently wrote an interesting essay, which concluded with this important admonition:

Be wary.  Look at a broader range of statistics, and take apart the existing statistics.  Don’t just take the pronouncements of our government at face value.  They are experts in saying what is technically true, while implying what is false.  Be wary.

David Merkel’s posting focused on the positive spin provided by a representative of Morgan Stanley concerning 4th Quarter 2010 Gross Domestic Product.  Merkel’s analysis of this statistic included some good advice:

In 4Q 2010 real GDP rose 3.1%, while real Gross Domestic Purchases fell 0.2%.  Why?  Energy and other import costs rose which depressed the price indexes for GDP versus Gross Domestic Purchases.

Over the long haul, the two series are close to equal, but when they diverge, they tell a story.  The current story is that average consumers in the US are doing badly, while those benefiting from high corporate profits, and increasing exports are doing well.

In general, I am not impressed with statistics collected by our government, or how they use them.  But it’s useful to understand what they mean — to understand the limitations of the statistics, so that when naive/conniving politicians use them wrongly, one can see through the error.

David Merkel’s point about “understanding the limitations of the statistics” is something that a good commentator should “fess up to” when discussing particular stats.  Michael Shedlock’s analysis of the March Nonfarm Payrolls Report provides a refreshing example of that type of candor:

Given the total distortions of reality with respect to not counting people who allegedly dropped out of the work force, it is hard to discuss the numbers.

The official unemployment rate is 8.8%.  However, if you start counting all the people that want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is.  That number is in the last row labeled U-6.

While the “official” unemployment rate is an unacceptable 8.8%, U-6 is much higher at 15.7%.

Things are much worse than the reported numbers would have you believe.

That said, this was a solid jobs report, not as measured by the typical recovery, but one of the better reports we have seen for years.

On the negative side, wages are not keeping up with the CPI, wage growth is skewed to the top end, and full time jobs are hard to come by.

At the current pace, the unemployment number would ordinarily drop, but not fast.  However, many of those millions who dropped out of the workforce could start looking if they think jobs may be out there.  Should that happen, the unemployment rate could rise, even if the economy adds jobs at this pace.  It is very questionable if this pace of jobs keeps up.

In other words, if a significant number of those people the BLS has ignored as having “dropped out of the workforce” prove the BLS wrong by actually applying for new job opportunities as they appear, the BLS will have to reconcile their reporting with that “new reality”.  Perhaps many of those “phantom people” were really there all along and the only thing preventing their detection was the absence of job opportunities.  As those “workforce dropouts” return to the BLS radar screen by applying for new job opportunities, the BLS will report it as a “rise” in the unemployment rate.  In reality, that updated statistic will reflect what the unemployment rate had been all along.  An improving job market will just make it easier to face the truth.




Some Good News For Once

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Since the Great Recession began three years ago, Americans have been receiving a daily dose of the most miserable news imaginable.  Our prevalent nightmare concerns the possibility that gasoline prices could find their way up to $10 per gallon as Muammar Gawdawful takes Libya into a full-scale civil war.

Some people tried to find a thread of hope in the latest non-farm payrolls report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The report was spun in several opposing directions by various commentators.  The single statement from the BLS report which seemed most important to me was the remark in the first sentence that    “. . .  the unemployment rate was little changed at 8.9 percent . . .”.  Nevertheless, David Leonhardt of The New York Times noted his suspicion that “the government is understating actual job growth” while providing his own upbeat read of the report.  On the other hand, at the Zero Hedge website, Tyler Durden made this observation:

Wonder why the unemployment rate is at an artificially low 8.9%?  Three simple words:  Labor Force Participation.  At 64.2%, it was unchanged from last month, and continues to be at a 25 year low.  Should the LFP return to its 25 trendline average of 66.1%, the unemployment rate would be 11.6%.

Indeed, the ugly truth is that as you spend more time pondering the current unemployment situation, you find an increasingly dismal picture.  Economist Mark Thoma came up with a “back of the envelope calculation” of the benchmarks he foresees as the unemployment situation abates:

7% unemployment in July of 2012

6% unemployment in March of 2013

5% unemployment in December of 2013

4% unemployment in September of 2014

If anything, relative to the last two recoveries, this forecast is optimistic.  Even so, it will still take two years to get to 6% unemployment (and if the natural rate is closer to 5.5% at that time, as I expect it will be, it will take another five months to fully close the gap). Things may be looking up, but we have a long way to go and it’s too soon to turn our backs on the unemployed.

Only three more years until we return to pre-crisis levels!  Whoopie!

For those in search of genuinely good news, I went on a quest to come up with some for this piece.  Here’s what I found:

For the truly desperate, the Salon website has introduced a new weekly feature entitled, “The Week In Uppers”.  It is a collection of stories, often including video clips, which will (hopefully) make you smile.  The items are heavy on good deeds – sometimes by celebrities.

I was quite surprised by this next “good news” item:  A report by Rex Nutting of MarketWatch, revealing this welcome fact:

.   .   .  the United States remains the biggest manufacturing economy in the world, producing about 20% of the value of global output in 2010  . . .  (Although fast-growing China will pass the United States soon enough.)

Even though we may soon drop to second place, at least our unemployment rate should be in decline by that point.  Here are some more encouraging factoids from Rex Nutting’s essay:

In 2010, U.S. factories shipped $5.03 trillion worth of goods out the door, up 9% from 2009’s horribly depressed output, according to the Census Bureau.

*   *   *

In 2010 alone, productivity in the manufacturing sector surged 6.7%. Fortunately for workers, it looks as if companies have squeezed as much extra output out of labor as they can right now.  For the first time since 1997, factories actually added jobs during the calendar year in 2010, as they hired 112,000 additional workers.

There will be further job gains as factories ramp up their production to meet rising demand, economists say.

According to the Institute for Supply Management’s monthly survey of corporate purchasing managers, business is booming.  The ISM index rose for a seventh straight month in February to 61.4%, matching the highest reading since 1983.

*   *   *

What is the ISM telling us?  “The manufacturing sector is on fire,” says Stephen Stanley, chief economist for Pierpont Securities.  The new orders index rose to 68%, the highest since 2004, and the employment index rose to 64.5%, the highest since 1973.

Factories are hiring because orders are stacking up faster than they can produce goods.

What’s behind the boom?  In part, it’s domestic demand for capital goods and consumer goods.  Businesses are finally beginning to believe in the recovery, so they’re starting to expand, which means new equipment must be purchased.

Be sure to read the full report if you want to re-ignite those long, lost feelings of optimism.

It’s nice to know that if you look hard enough you can still find some good news (at least for now).


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MythBusting

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How many times have you heard politicians or mainstream media pundits dump on “The Internet” as an unreliable source of information, due to an abundance of unchecked, dubious reports, which are touted as the truth?  To the contrary, politicians are the least reliable sources of information in our society because – as everyone knows – they are crooks and liars.

The mainstream media have been vested with unchallenged credibility for too long.  It wasn’t until the advent of on-line news reporting (and blogging) when the news “authorities” were subjected to a regular scheme of serious fact-checking.  Nevertheless, the mainstream media still persist in promoting erroneous stories that seem to take on a life of their own – partly because so many news outlets stumble over each other for the sake of parroting the same meme reported by a competitor.  Remember the “Balloon Boy” story?  For an entire afternoon last year, the nation stayed glued to the television, watching a UFO-styled balloon float across Colorado with helicopters in hot pursuit.  Throughout that entire episode, no news reporter or TV commentator saw fit to raise the question:  Is that balloon really large enough to lift a little boy into the sky and haul him through the air like that while it is obviously deflating?  Of course not.  That would have killed the story.

This week brought us a few commentaries, which have done a good job of running against the mainstream media-generated consensus reality to show us what is hiding under the rock.  The first item was something I found on The Big Picture website:  a 50-page, on-line book by Jonathan Tasini entitled, It’s Not Raining, We’re Getting Peed On:  The Scam of the Deficit Crisis.  Tasini went beyond deflating the hype of the deficit crisis to challenge nine other myths, referred to as “Stupid Statements”.  He followed that with his discussion of a disease afflicting politicians and media commentators:  Elititis Experitits.  Tasini covered a lot of ground in a mere 50 pages, concluding with the point that the only deficit being experienced by America right now is a deficit of moral leadership.

Another fine example of mythbusting was provided by Brett Arends in a piece for MarketWatch entitled, “The Truth about California”.  Brett Arends took a noble step forward to challenge the popular myth that California is about to default on its debts and that the Golden State is in desperate need of a bailout from Uncle Sam.  Arends began the essay with this statement:

I know that facts and truth seem to be optional these days.  I know that in the exciting new world of infinite media everyone can choose to believe whatever fantasies they want. But in the case of California, it’s getting on my nerves.

Arends relied on data from the Tax Foundation to go beyond debunking the myth that “California needs a bailout” – to argue that California has been bailing out the rest of the country:

The numbers are simply staggering.  In the quarter century through 2005 (the most recent year for which we have data), Californians bailed out the rest of America to the tune of about $620 billion in today’s dollars.  In 2005 alone it came to nearly $50 billion.

That is 30 times next year’s forecast “budget shortfall” in Sacramento. The only reason California has a budget problem at all is because they have, foolishly, spent so much money subsidizing everyone else.

If it weren’t for that, California could cut its state and local taxes by around $1,300 a person.  That’s a $1,300 tax cut for every man, woman and child. Hmmm.  Funny you never read about that anywhere, isn’t it?

Our third example of mythbusting comes from recent California expatriate, Jr. Deputy Accountant, who exposed the “man behind the curtain” in Catherine Rampell’s article for The New York Times entitled, “Corporate Profits Were the Highest on Record Last Quarter”:

Filed under:  totally unbelievable headlines that are even less believable once you actually dig into the truth behind the big fancy headline.

As Jr. Deputy Accountant points out, Reading Rampell’s article as far as the third paragraph brings you to the disclaimer, which lets the air out of this UFO balloon:

The government does not adjust the numbers for inflation, in part because these corporate profits can be affected by pricing changes from all over the world and because the government does not have a price index for individual companies.

Beyond that, near the end of the Times article, the reader is confronted with an unpleasant fact, which undermines the optimistic tone of the headline:

“The economy is not growing fast enough to reduce significantly the unemployment rate or to prevent a slide into deflation,” Paul Dales, a United States economist for Capital Economics, wrote in a note to clients.  “This is unlikely to change in 2011 or 2012.”

At least the ugly truth was available to those willing to actually read the article.

As Jonathan Tasini pointed out in his on-line book, the traditional media are “uninformed, lazy and always desperate to be part of the insider crowd”.  Perhaps that is another reason why traditional media outlets are finding themselves replaced by Internet-based news sources.


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Not Getting It Done

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August 9, 2010

Are the Democrats trying to lose their majorities in both the Senate and the House in November?  Their two biggest accomplishments, the healthcare “reform” bill and the financial “reform” bill haven’t really impressed the electorate.  According to a Gallup Poll, voter reaction to the passage of the “Affordable Healthcare Act” is 49 percent contending that the bill is a “good thing” as opposed to 46 percent who believe it is a “bad thing”, with 5 percent undecided.  Criticism of the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010” has been widespread, as I have previously discussed here, here and here.  The latest critique of the bill came from Professor Thomas F. Cooley, of the Stern School of Business at NYU.  His Forbes article entitled, “The Politics Of Regulatory Reform”, was based on this theme:

The awareness of how close we came to paralyzing the financial system created an opportunity to do something truly significant to make the system safer and more in tune with the needs of our economy.  Sadly, because all things in Washington are political, we fumbled the ball.

Rahm Emanuel’s infamous doctrine, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” is apparently being disregarded by Rahm Emanuel and company at The White House.  Of course, the entire economic catastrophe has provided the Obama administration with a boatload of crises – most of which have already gone to waste.  For example, consider this fiasco-in-progress:  The “small business” sector plays such an important role in keeping Americans employed, a bill to facilitate lending to small businesses has been sponsored by Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana).  An August 7 report by Sharon Bernstein of the Los Angeles Times provided this update on the status of the measure:

The small business loan assistance ran into trouble in the Senate when members from both parties began attaching amendments to support their favored causes.

The ineffective efforts of Senate Democrats are unfairly souring public opinion on their more unified counterparts in the House.  In attempt to redeem the image of Congressional Dems, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi scheduled a special session of Congress for Tuesday, August 10, (an interruption of their August recess) to pass a $26-billion bill to avert public employee layoffs.

With the passing of time, it has become more obvious that President Obama’s biggest mistake since taking office was his weak leadership in promoting the economic stimulus effort.  Many commentators have expressed the opinion that Christina Romer’s resignation as chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors was based on her frustration with the under-funded stimulus program.

I recently wrote an “I told you so” piece, referencing my July, 2009 prediction that it would eventually become necessary for President Obama to introduce a second stimulus bill because the $787 billion proposal would prove inadequate.  At his blog, liberal economist Paul Krugman similarly reminded readers of his prediction about the consequences for failing to pass an effective stimulus bill:

So here’s the picture that scares me:  It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up.  Mr. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed.

But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed, partly because job-creation policies are conflated in the public mind with deeply unpopular bank bailouts.  And as a result, the recession rages on, unchecked.

The reality has turned out even worse than Krugman’s prediction because we are now approaching September 2010 – an election year – and the unemployment rate is being understated at 9.5 percent.  The conflation Krugman discussed has manifested itself in the narrative of the Tea Party movement.  In September of 2009, I discussed why Obama should have been listening to Australian economist Steve Keen, who – by that point – was saying basically the same thing:

So giving the stimulus to the debtors is a more potent way of reducing the impact of a credit crunch — the opposite of the advice given to Obama by his neoclassical advisers.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz recently provided us with this update about how the global financial crisis is affecting Australia in August of 2010:

Kevin Rudd, who was prime minister when the crisis struck, put in place one of the best-designed Keynesian stimulus packages of any country in the world.  He realized that it was important to act early, with money that would be spent quickly, but that there was a risk that the crisis would not be over soon.  So the first part of the stimulus was cash grants, followed by investments, which would take longer to put into place.

Rudd’s stimulus worked:  Australia had the shortest and shallowest of recessions of the advanced industrial countries.

Meanwhile, President Obama and the Democrats have decided to utilize a mid-term campaign strategy of assessing all of the blame for our current financial chaos on President George W. Bush.  Criticism of this approach has been voiced by people outside of the Republican camp.  Frank Rich of The New York Times lamented the lack of message control exercised by the Democrats and their ill-advised focus on the Bush era:

But rather than wait for miracles or pray that Bushphobia will save the day, Democrats might instead start playing the hand they’ve been dealt.  Elections, the cliché goes, are about the future, not the past.  At the very least they’re about the present.

At this point in American history, it’s becoming more obvious that the two-party system has served no other purpose than to perpetuate the careers of blundering grafters.  The voting public must accept the reality that the only way it will be honestly and effectively represented in Washington is by independent candidates.  The laws that keep those independents off the ballots must be changed.




The End

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July 29, 2010

The long-awaited economic recovery seems to be coming to a premature end.  For over a year, many pundits have been anticipating a “jobless recovery”.  In other words:  don’t be concerned about the fact that so many people can’t find jobs – the economy will recover anyway.  These hopes have been buoyed by the widespread corporate tactic of cost-cutting (usually by mass layoffs) to gin-up the bottom line in time for earnings reports.  This helps inflate stock prices and produce the illusion that the broader economy is experiencing a sustained recovery.  The “jobless recovery” advocates ignore the extent to which the American economy is consumer-driven.  If those consumers don’t have jobs, they aren’t going to be spending money.

Although many observers seem to take comfort in the assumption that the jobless rate is below ten percent, many are beginning to question the validity of the statistics to that effect provided by the Department of Labor.  AOL’s Daily Finance website provided this commentary on the June, 2010 unemployment survey conducted by Raghavan Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence:

The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who’s unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation.  That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department’s jobless numbers.

*   *   *

In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled “The Unemployment Myth,” that the government had “cooked the books” by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low.  At the time, Goolsbee was a professor at the University of Chicago.  When asked whether Goolsbee still believes the government undercounts unemployment, a White House spokeswoman said Goolsbee wasn’t available to comment.

Such undercounting of unemployment can be an enormously dangerous exercise today.  It could lead  some lawmakers to underestimate the gravity of the labor market’s problems and base their policymaking on a far-less-grim picture than actually exists.  Economically, and socially, that would make a bad situation much worse for America.

“The implications of such undercounting is that policymakers aren’t going to be thinking as big as they should be,” says Ginsburg, also a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College.  “It also means that [consumer] demand is not going to be there, because the income from people who are employed isn’t going to be there.”

Frank Aquila of Sullivan & Cromwell recently wrote an article for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, discussing the possibility that we could be headed into the second leg of a “double-dip” recession:

The sputtering economy and talk of a possible second recession have certainly rattled an already fragile American consumer.  Consumer confidence is now at its lowest level in a year, and consumer spending tumbled in May and June.  Since consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of  U.S. economic growth, a nervous consumer is not a good omen for a robust recovery.

Job creation is a key factor in increasing consumer confidence.  While economists estimate that we need economic growth of 4 percent or more to stimulate significant job creation, the economy has grown at only about 2 percent to 3 percent, with a slowdown expected in the second half.

*   *   *

With governments struggling under the weight of ballooning budget deficits and businesses waiting for the return of sustained growth, it is the American consumer who will have to lift the global economy out of the mire.  Given the recent news and current consumer sentiment, that appears to be an unlikely prospect in the near term.

The same government that found it necessary to provide corporate welfare to those “too big to fail” financial institutions has now become infested with creatures described by Barry Ritholtz as “deficit chicken hawks”.  The deficit chicken hawks are now preaching the gospel of “austerity” as an excuse for roadblocking any further efforts to use any form of stimulus to end the economic crisis.  One of the gurus of the deficit chicken hawks is economic historian Niall Ferguson.  Because Ferguson is just an economic historian, a real economist – Brad DeLong — had no trouble exposing the hypocrisy exhibited by the Iraq war cheerleader, while revisiting an article Ferguson had written for The New York Times, back in 2003.  Matthew Yglesias had even more fun compiling and publishing a Ferguson (2003) vs. Ferguson (2010) debate.

At The Daily Beast, Sir Harry Evans emphasized how the sudden emphasis on “austerity” is worse than hypocrisy:

As for the banks, one of the obscenities of our time is that so many in the financial community who owe their survival to the massive taxpayer bailouts, not only rewarded themselves with absurd bonuses, but now have the gall to sport the plumage of deficit hawks.  The unemployed?  Let them eat cake, the day after tomorrow.

Gerald Celente, publisher of The Trends Journal, wrote a great essay for The Daily Reckoning website entitled, “Let Them Eat Losses”.  He pointed out how the kleptocracy violated and destroyed the “very essence of functioning capitalism”.  Worse yet, our government betrayed us by forcing the taxpayers “to finance the failed financiers”:

No individual, business, institution, nation or empire is too-big-to-fail.  Had true capitalism been allowed to function unimpeded, the bloated, over-extended, inefficient and gluttonous firms and industries would have failed.  There would have been hardships and losses but, finally rid of its financial tapeworms, the purged system could be restored to health.

No “ism” or “ology” — regardless of purity of intent or moral foundation — is immune to corruption and abuse.  While capitalism itself is being blamed for the excesses that brought on financial chaos, prior to the most recent gambling binge, in tandem with the blanket dismantling of safeguards and the overt takeover of Washington by Wall Street, capitalism was responsible for creating one of the world’s most successful and universally admired societies.

As I discussed on July 8, because President Obama lacked the political courage to advance an effective economic stimulus package last year, the effects of his “semi-stimulus” have now abated and we are headed into another recession.  Reuters reported on July 27 that Robert Shiller, professor of economics at Yale University and co-developer of Standard and Poor’s S&P/Case-Shiller Index, gave us this unsettling macroeconomic prognostication:

“For me a double-dip is another recession before we’ve healed from this recession … The probability of that kind of double-dip is more than 50 percent,” Shiller said.

“I actually expect it.”

During the last few months of 2009, did you ever think that someday you would be looking back at that time as “the good old days”?