subject: The Peaceful Status In American Jobs Has Been Disturbed [print this page] Recently, some analysts analyze the charts reflecting the status quo of employment in the U.S.
To spell this out: high corporate profits and low levels of job growth are two sides of the same coin. If things were working properly right now, companies would take their excess revenues and use them to hire more people. Instead, theyre basically just letting those excess revenues sit on their balance sheets as cash because theyre scared to invest in themselves. Its frankly pathetic.
The solution to this problem is nothing complex the arbitrage is sitting there in the first chart, plain for all to see. The government can borrow at 1.45%: it should do so, in vast quantities, and invest that money back into the economy itself. Take a few hundred billion dollars and use it to fix our broken infrastructure, to re-hire all those laid-off teachers and firefighters, to provide some kind of safety net for the millions of Americans who have been out of work for more than a year. Even if the real long-term return on any stimulus package was zero, the nominal long-term return would be well over 1.45%, making the investment worthwhile.
To put it another way, not all crises look the same. Back in 2008-9, the fact that we were in a crisis was obvious, and it resulted in unprecedented levels of enormous coordinated actions between Treasury and the Fed. Now, however, when we look at the crisis-level spreads in the first chart, we dont think crisis any more and the sense of urgency that everybody felt in 2008-9 is long gone. How many more dreadful jobs reports do we need before it returns?
The 2012 election should be a referendum between two visions of America. On the left, Obama should say that were in a jobs crisis, and that hes going to do everything in his power to get people back to work by employing them directly, if need be. On the right, Romney can say that job creation should be left to US companies, despite the fact that those companies(mining machinery industryore beneficiation ) are signally failing to increase their payrolls despite their record-high profits. And then the public can choose which side they want to vote for.
Sadly, the lines wont be drawn nearly that cleanly: Obama is bizarrely reluctant to talk about anything which rhymes with stimulus. As a result, the current dysfunction and horribly weak jobs market is likely to persist for far too long.
