Mmmmm…”recalibrations of seasonal fluctuations! I ‘d love to let Stephen Colbert loose on that phrase. Look more closely, and you will see these recalibrations: deal with GOVERNMENT EMPLOYMENT, not jobs in the private sector. There were 71,000 jobs “recalibrated” in local education.
Yet establishment economists are saying these jobs are not what the economy really needs. The Journal quotes Nigel Gault, chief economist at Global Insight to the effect that “private sector jobs are the underlying driver of the economy.”
Yes they are, but these are not them. The biggest jump here is in government jobs. NBC News reported on yet more job cuts in Flint Michigan Saturday and that manufacturing jobs are at their lowest point since l950.
Presumably you would think the disappearance of these jobs would be upsetting to the wise men of Wall Street. In fact, they are but their concerns are being buried in stories that fuel the perception that the corner is being turned.
Example: way down in the 19th paragraph of the Journal article, The Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank Donald Kohn says he expected that the nations “economic performance would be better.” He says, “You should view these forecasts even more skeptically than usual.”
But the business press, like the market that loves any excuse for a good rally is not that skeptical. They tend to like positive numbers and downplay negative ones often without analyzing them.
Back at the NY Times, you had to jump from page one in the Business section with its “Job Growth Looks Rosier” headline to page 8. There, at the very bottom of the last page, next to the corporate bond data-- a place most readers don’t venture ---are these quotes;
“I don¹t think we¹re totally out of the woods yet,” said Jan Hatzius, Chief United States economist for Goldman Sachs. “There are some real problems at the foundations of the economy. If nothing really bad happens, we can muddle through and unwind some of these problems over a lengthy period of time. And if something bad happens, we go into a recession.”
So there it is that depressing “R word” again but pushed all the way down in the story. In journalism, we used to call this ‘burying the lead.’
Clearly the recession threat hasn¹t gone away. Not at all! As for "bad things” to fear, that surely includes the expected jump in oil prices and more unemployment.The actual rise reported in unemployment was minimized in most of the press accounts. (On Sunday, London’s Observer reported: “Tens of thousands of New York bankers are braced for a crippling round of job cuts as the aftershocks of the credit-market collapse reverberate the length and breadth of Wall Street.”)
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