From today's Enterprise Blog:
The chart above helps to illustrate the current economic situation by showing the percent changes since the third quarter of 2007 for five key economic variables: real personal consumption spending, real disposable personal income, real GDP, private payroll employment, and real business investment. As can be seen in the chart, consumption, income, and production have all recovered from the effects of the Great Recession and are now back to their pre-recession levels. But private employment remains almost 6 percent and more than 6 million jobs below the pre-recession level, and that’s associated with private business investment that remains 10 percent below 2007 levels.
Bottom Line: Private job creation and private business investment are so closely linked that the current “jobless recovery” could also be described as an “investment-less recovery.” The chart above helps to show that it’s not a lack of consumer spending, weak gains in personal income, or sluggish real output growth that are holding back job creation. Rather, it’s weak business investment spending that is largely responsible for the sub-par recovery.
The attempts to jump-start the economy with fiscal and monetary stimulus haven’t brought the jobs back because they haven’t created the right incentives to bring private business investment spending back to a level that would restore jobs to pre-recession levels. If we could focus instead on removing the many political and regulatory uncertainties that are holding back private business investment, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship, only then will the “investment-less recovery” end. And when it ends, strong job creation will automatically follow and then the "jobless recovery" will end.
Related: "As is well known, large companies have $2 trillion of cash and securities, up $520 billion since year-end 2007. That's money firms could use to hire and invest in plants or new products — if managers were more confident. Instead, they're stockpiling funds against another financial crisis."
~Robert Samuelson's article "Risk Aversion Has Economy Frozen Stiff"
Update: In response to some of the comments, the chart below shows that real personal consumption expenditures are about 1% above the re-recession level.
The attempts to jump-start the economy with fiscal and monetary stimulus haven’t brought the jobs back because they haven’t created the right incentives to bring private business investment spending back to a level that would restore jobs to pre-recession levels. If we could focus instead on removing the many political and regulatory uncertainties that are holding back private business investment, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship, only then will the “investment-less recovery” end. And when it ends, strong job creation will automatically follow and then the "jobless recovery" will end.
Related: "As is well known, large companies have $2 trillion of cash and securities, up $520 billion since year-end 2007. That's money firms could use to hire and invest in plants or new products — if managers were more confident. Instead, they're stockpiling funds against another financial crisis."
~Robert Samuelson's article "Risk Aversion Has Economy Frozen Stiff"
Update: In response to some of the comments, the chart below shows that real personal consumption expenditures are about 1% above the re-recession level.
No comments:
Post a Comment