Daily Archives: July 9, 2009

Think Unemployment Claims Show a Glimmer of Hope? Think Again.

by Pavlina R. Tcherneva

Last week 565,000 people filed first time jobless claims. Although this is the smallest number since January 2009, it is hardly cause for celebration. The unemployment claims data is highly volatile, and numbers reported during holiday weeks are especially poor indicators of employment trends. More telling is the number of continuing unemployment claims, which hit yet another record high of 6,883,000.

While many economists think that the economy is experiencing a labor market shock which will correct sooner or later, data on the duration of unemployment paints a different picture. Problems with the labor market have been brewing for decades.

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Time For the Third Stimulus Package

by L. Randall Wray

According to Paul Krugman “voices calling for stronger stimulus are, may I say, sorta kinda respectable — several Nobelists in the bunch, plus a large fraction of the prominent economists who predicted the housing crash before it happened.”

Professor Krugman provides a link to those who argued that the second stimulus was too small, as well as to those who are already calling for a third stimulus. Three UMKC-affiliated professors are listed, including yours truly. With some immodesty, I’d like to point out that Wynne Godley and I were already calling for a stimulus package in 1999. We were worried that a tightening fiscal stance forced our economy to rely on unsustainable private sector deficits. We said:

“Growing government budget surpluses combined with growing trade deficits have generated record private sector deficits. Unless households continue to reduce their saving—creating an increasingly unsustainable debt burden—the impetus that has driven the expansion will evaporate.”

Of course the economy did quickly collapse into recession, but emerged due to restoration of a budget deficit plus a growing domestic private sector deficit. Over the years, many of us continued to warn that the budget remained too tight while private sector deficits were unsustainable. It all went on far longer than we expected, which does not prove us wrong but rather means that the slump will be immensely worse than it would have been had it come to an end earlier. That is why many of us believe the stimulus is orders of magnitude too small. The private sector is left with a monumental debt overhang and things will not get better until private balance sheets recover.

The best thing that the government can do now is to stop the job losses and to start creating jobs. We are not talking about a couple of million new jobs at this point—we need 6.5 million to replace those already lost, plus another 1-2 million to provide jobs for those who would have entered the labor force (high school and college graduates, for example) if the economy had not collapsed. Reports this morning show that President Obama’s approval rating is falling—below 50% in the swing state of Ohio—and job loss is a big part of the reason. Pessimism is setting in and it will be hard to overcome because it is well-founded. Job losses are devastating for communities—retailers are hit, real estate prices continue to fall, and state and local governments are forced to cut spending.

Many are looking back to 1937, when fiscal policy inappropriately tightened and threw the economy back into depression; indeed the collapse in 1937 was faster than the original crash that started the Great Depression off. To some extent that is not the correct analogy because most of the second stimulus package has yet to be spent, and recent data reported by Mike Norman shows that the federal deficit has actually increased in recent days. But it is still not enough, as evidenced by the growing economic stress around the country.

I realize that it is important for Congress to settle on some dollar figures for a third stimulus because that is the way that budgeting works. But in truth it is impossible to say beforehand how much we will need to stop the carnage. As James Galbraith has been warning, it is better to err on the upside. So far we have done the opposite—with the predictable result that the economy continues on a path toward another great depression.

Loans, Asset Purchases, and Exit Strategies—Why the WSJ Doesn’t Understand the Fed’s Operations

by Scott Fullwiler

Some may have noticed a few weeks ago when the European Central Bank – the counterpart to the Federal Reserve in the Eurozone – conducted a one-day operation that resulted in $622 billion in 1-year loans to the European banking system. At the time, I and others wondered where the fanfare was, as a similar operation by the Fed would surely have resulted in an outcry about the inflationary impact of such a large “liquidity” injection. But a piece by Simon Nixon in the Wall Street Journal explains why there was so little fanfare. As Nixon put it:

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