I was on Larry Kudlow last night talking about the state of the consumer. He’s right that there are green shoots. Case-Shiller home prices are up. The stock market looks awesome. Our latest annualized GDP growth rate was 5.6%. My response was pretty straightforward: stocks look good, but consumers are people. More than 27 million working age Americans are out of work or looking for more work. You can’t have a confident consumer with a fifth of the labor force under- or unemployed.<\/p>\n
The short story of the recession’s labor market goes something like this. Employers who saw the recession bottom out in mid-2009 have started to
\nrestock (replenishing inventories contributed two-third of 2009Q4’s
\n5.6% annualized growth rate). But they’re making do with fewer
\nfull-time workers, more part-time workers, and record-low work hours. On the one hand, you could could argue the job market is wound like a
\ntightly coiled spring waiting to pop, and our recovery could be a lot
\nmore rigorous than the naysayers expect. On the other hand, when the economy really picks up, employers have a lot of slack before they have to wade into the jobless market. They can raise hours from their record lows. They can hire the part-timers. Maybe that helps to explain why even after two quarters of positive economic growth, job openings are basically where they were a year ago. <\/p>\n
We’re moved beyond the hiring crisis, but we haven’t moved beyond the firing crisis. Until we do, the consumer will continue to be grumpy.<\/p>\n
Productivity is a good thing. But reading about our super-productive workforce isn’t going to comfort the unemployed. As Neil Irwin reported in the Washington Post, businesses are only producing 3 percent fewer goods and services than when the recession started, but Americans are working 10 percent fewer hours. Work hours are getting the squeeze, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-493214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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