The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST
Last week we got an actually good employment report — arguably the first truly good report in a long time. The U.S. economy added well over 300,000 jobs; wages, which have been stagnant for far too long, picked up a bit. Other indicators, like the rate at which workers are quitting (a sign that they expect to find new jobs), continue to improve. We’re still nowhere near full employment, but getting there no longer seems like an impossible dream.
And there are some important lessons from this belated good news. It doesn’t vindicate policies that permitted seven years and counting of depressed incomes and employment. But it does put the lie to some of the nonsense you hear about why the economy has lagged.
Krugman goes on to say that this was not just any kind of a recession we endured for the last seven years, but a special kind of "post-modern" recession where a bubble bursts.
I am not sure if he is right about this or not. But I predicted the bubble bursting long before it did. There were news stories on the network TV news about what the banks were doing with pushing mortgages on people who would not be able to pay them off, long before the bubble burst, and long before that there had been a lot of other indicators.
I feel part of what Krugman is doing here is trying to soften the criticism of Obama and say he couldn't have done much better, given the kind of Congress he had to work with (or I should say, not work with).
OK, that I buy but that isn't exactly news,
If you want to read the rest of Krugman's analysis, (he says more than I am noting here), go to:
Last week we got an actually good employment report — arguably the first truly good report in a long time. The U.S. economy added well over 300,000 jobs; wages, which have been stagnant for far too long, picked up a bit. Other indicators, like the rate at which workers are quitting (a sign that they expect to find new jobs), continue to improve. We’re still nowhere near full employment, but getting there no longer seems like an impossible dream.
And there are some important lessons from this belated good news. It doesn’t vindicate policies that permitted seven years and counting of depressed incomes and employment. But it does put the lie to some of the nonsense you hear about why the economy has lagged.
Krugman goes on to say that this was not just any kind of a recession we endured for the last seven years, but a special kind of "post-modern" recession where a bubble bursts.
I am not sure if he is right about this or not. But I predicted the bubble bursting long before it did. There were news stories on the network TV news about what the banks were doing with pushing mortgages on people who would not be able to pay them off, long before the bubble burst, and long before that there had been a lot of other indicators.
I feel part of what Krugman is doing here is trying to soften the criticism of Obama and say he couldn't have done much better, given the kind of Congress he had to work with (or I should say, not work with).
OK, that I buy but that isn't exactly news,
If you want to read the rest of Krugman's analysis, (he says more than I am noting here), go to:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered