corrente

We're still waiting...

Peter G. Gosselin of the LA Times writes:

Still other optimists assert that although payrolls may be shrinking now, new jobs — millions of them — are just around the corner. But a recent New York Federal Reserve Bank study, the first to try to explain what distinguishes this recovery and its early 1990s cousin from others in the last half-century, puts a serious damper on their predictions.

The study by economists Erica Groshen and Simon Potter concludes that most job losses in the two recent recessions involved permanent elimination of positions, not temporary and easily reversible layoffs. And it says that most of what gains there have been so far this time have involved establishing new jobs in wholly different parts of the economy from where the losses occurred.

"If job growth now depends on the creation of new positions in different firms and industries," Groshen and Potter write, "then we would expect a long lag before employment rebounded."

Translation: Don't expect a jobs boom — and a big new lift for the economy — anytime soon.

Quack, quack...