From the Daily News:
Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S.
labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment
rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October,
when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the
figure is a whopping 17.5%.
While losing 200,000 jobs per month
is better than the 700,000 jobs lost in January, current job losses
still average more than the per month rate of 150,000 during the last
recession.
Also, remember: The last recession ended in November
2001, but job losses continued for more than a year and half until June
of 2003; ditto for the 1990-91 recession.
So we can expect that
job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In
other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just
waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down.
All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just
are not coming back.
There's really just one hope for our
leaders to turn things around: a bold prescription that increases the
fiscal stimulus with another round of labor-intensive, shovel-ready
infrastructure projects, helps fiscally strapped state and local
governments and provides a temporary tax credit to the private sector
to hire more workers. Helping the unemployed just by extending
unemployment benefits is necessary not sufficient; it leads to
persistent unemployment rather than job creation.
The long-term
picture for workers and families is even worse than current job loss
numbers alone would suggest. Now as a way of sharing the pain, many
firms are telling their workers to cut hours, take furloughs and accept
lower wages. Specifically, that fall in hours worked is equivalent to
another 3 million full time jobs lost on top of the 7.5 million jobs
formally lost.
This is very bad news but we must face facts.
Many of the lost jobs are gone forever, including construction jobs,
finance jobs and manufacturing jobs. Recent studies suggest that a
quarter of U.S. jobs are fully out-sourceable over time to other
countries.
Other measures tell the same ugly story: The average
length of unemployment is at an all time high; the ratio of job
applicants to vacancies is 6 to 1; initial claims are down but
continued claims are very high and now millions of unemployed are
resorting to the exceptional extended unemployment benefits programs
and are staying in them longer.
Based on my best judgment, it
is most likely that the unemployment rate will peak close to 11% and
will remain at a very high level for two years or more.
The
weakness in labor markets and the sharp fall in labor income ensure a
weak recovery of private consumption and an anemic recovery of the
economy, and increases the risk of a double dip recession.
As a
result of these terribly weak labor markets, we can expect weak
recovery of consumption and economic growth; larger budget deficits;
greater delinquencies in residential and commercial real estate and
greater fall in home and commercial real estate prices; greater losses
for banks and financial institutions on residential and commercial real
estate mortgages, and in credit cards, auto loans and student loans and
thus a greater rate of failures of banks; and greater protectionist
pressures.
The damage will be extensive and severe unless bold policy action is undertaken now.
Roubini is professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University and Chairman of Roubini Global Economics.
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