Perspective

Posted: March 5, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Bailout Blues, Global Financial Crisis, The Bonus Class, The Great Recession, U.S. Economy | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

The WSJ has an interesting list of folks contributing to “Academics on What Caused the Financial Crisis“. You’ll find a lot of the usual suspects that we’ve talked about around here. There’s some interesting comments on the housing and subprime bubbles, the increased use of exotic financial instruments, and our old friend moral hazard. I’m going to a highlight just a few for you.

Some of the more interesting comments focused on how the housing bubble was enabled by government. Some blame low interest rates by the FED, others see that it wasn’t just a U.S. phenomenon and look for bigger reasons. Many folks see securitization and the pass-the-trash loan model as the big factors.

Dwight Jaffee, Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley

On the government’s role in creating the housing bubble: “I find the GSEs [government sponsored enterprises including Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae] to have been a significant factor in expanding the mortgage crisis as a result of their high volume of high-risk mortgage purchases and guarantees. Furthermore, I find that the GSE housing goals for lending to lower-income households and in lower-income regions were secondary to profits as a factor motivating the GSE investments in high-risk mortgages.

…

Christopher Mayer, Columbia Business School

On the housing bubble: “For the housing market, the picture is much more complex than it might first appear. The housing bubble was global in nature and also included commercial real estate, so simple explanations that rely solely on predominantly American institutions like subprime lending or highly structured securitizations cannot be the only factor leading to real estate market excesses. …My own research shows the important role played by declining long‐term, real interest rates in helping drive real estate prices to high levels, at least up to 2005. However, at some point, speculation by both borrowers and lenders took over, leading to excessive appreciation in many parts of the United States and the rest of the world.”

…

Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, University of California at Berkeley:

How did subprime bust trigger a financial tsunami? “Three factors ensured that the collapse in what was a minor segment of the U.S. financial markets turned into a global financial conflagration. First, profound structural changes in the banking system, with the emergence of the ‘originate-and-distribute’ model, coupled with an increased securitization of credit instruments, led to a decline in lending standards and a general inability to re-price complex financial products when liquidity dried-up.

Randall Kroszner, University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a former Fed governor:

On reducing moral hazard: “Given the extent of interventions world-wide, issues of moral hazard will remain. The Rubicon cannot be uncrossed and financial market behavior will surely anticipate the return of the “temporary” programs and guarantees in the event of another crisis. To maintain the stability of the system and to protect taxpayers, the “too interconnected to fail” problem needs to be addressed in two ways: through improvements in the supervision and regulation framework as well as improvements in the legal and market infrastructure to make markets more robust globally.”

“Ultimately, to mitigate the potential for moral hazard, policy makers must feel that the markets are sufficiently robust that institutions can be allowed to fail with extremely low likelihood of dire consequences for the system.”

These are just a few brief excerpts from a few of the contributors. You should really go check out the full article.

In the same vein, I wanted once again to go behind the unemployment number released to day and the WSJ has a pretty good explanation of the figure that I follow closely. It is called the U-6 unemployment rate. It not only focuses on people without jobs but people that are ‘underemployed’. This rate, unlike the unemployment rate itself which is staying around 9.7%, went up last month.

The U.S. jobless rate was unchanged at 9.7% in February, following a decline the previous month, but the government’s broader measure of unemployment ticked up 0.3 percentage point to 16.8%.

The comprehensive gauge of labor underutilization, known as the “U-6″ for its data classification by the Labor Department, accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs. Though the rate is still 0.6 percentage point below its high of 17.4% in October, its continuing divergence from the official number (the “U-3″ unemployment measure) indicates the job market has a long way to go before growth in the economy translates into relief for workers.

You can read more at NYT in a thread called “Is the Recovery Losing Steam?”

Again and despite what AZ Senator John Kyle says–as highlighted in Krugman’s recent op-ed “Bunning’s Universe”–most folks cannot make ends meet on unemployment benefits and must find jobs that are way beneath their job skills, their income requirements, or the lower the number of hours they wish to work. This more realistic rate accounts also for people who simply have given up on finding a job. These folks don’t even collect unemployment benefits. Just to remind you on Kyle’s priorities, here’s a good bit of prose from Krugman.

Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax.

Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.

You can see from various folks quoted on top (some from liberal and some from staunchly conservative b-schools), they do not place the blame for the last financial catastrophe on folks who don’t want to work and simply want to sit around collecting government money. Yet, if you look at today’s unemployment numbers, it’s just plain working folks that are not recovering from the financial global crisis. They are not getting the policy or money to deal with what the crisis did to them. Instead, the people who cause it are the one’s getting giant bonuses, boosts in stock prices, and continued government goodies.

Life isn’t necessarily fair, but does macroeconomic policy have to be so too during a Democratically led Congress and White House?

Batten down the Hatches

Posted: March 3, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Bailout Blues, Equity Markets, Global Financial Crisis, The Great Recession, U.S. Economy | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

Most economists are saying what most Americans have been saying for some time. This doesn’t feeling like a recovering economy. But is it just another calm before yet another storm? I earlier reported on a new thesis called “The Doomsday Cycle” and the attention that it had been receiving in academic circles. The idea is that the Fed and other central banks have just been increasingly feeding private sector debt to grow bubble economies and that despite several downturns that have been not so severe (the dot com or tech bubble) and severe (the housing or sub prime bubble), we continue offering easy credit that’s not supporting real growth in the world economy. There is now a report coming from some of my favorite Cassandras that suggests we’ve yet to work out on the problems of the last few years and it’s likely to get worse. This would include Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Public Watchdog of Bailout Funds Elizabeth Warren, and Rob Johnson of the United Nations Commission of Experts on Finance. The report argues that a down turn is coming that will be much worse than the recent one. The central cause of these continuing blow outs are those banks that continually speculate rather than lend to businesses that actually produce and do something which are being continually enabled by Federal governments everywhere.

The report warns that the country is now immersed in a “doomsday cycle” wherein banks use borrowed money to take massive risks in an attempt to pay big dividends to shareholders and big bonuses to management – and when the risks go wrong, the banks receive taxpayer bailouts from the government.

“Risk-taking at banks,” the report cautions, “will soon be larger than ever.”

Again, financial innovations are at the center of the maelstrom.

“While manufacturers have developed iPods and flat-screen televisions, the financial industry has perfected the art of offering mortgages, credit cards and check overdrafts laden with hidden terms that obscure price and risk,” Warren writes. “Good products are mixed with dangerous products, and consumers are left on their own to try to sort out which is which. The consequences can be disastrous.”

Frank Partnoy, a panelist from the University of San Diego, claims that “the balance sheets of most Wall Street banks are fiction.” Another panelist, Raj Date of the Cambridge Winter Center for Financial Institutions Policy, argues that government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have become “needlessly complex and irretrievably flawed” and should be eliminated. The report also calls for greater competition among credit rating agencies and increased regulation of the derivatives market, including requiring that credit-default swaps be traded on regulated exchanges.

At the same time, we’re seeing the reform bill that was intended to stop a repeat of the 2008 global financial crisis being watered down to the point of uselessness by congress and the FIRE lobby. You can watch at Bloomberg which is livestreaming the conference here at the Roosevelt Institute. It’s called Make Markets Better. I know it’s finance and economics, but you’re better off knowing, believe me.

Label me ‘Not Surprised’

Posted: February 23, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Bailout Blues, Equity Markets, Global Financial Crisis, Team Obama, The Bonus Class, The Great Recession, U.S. Economy | Tags: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Label me ‘Not Surprised’

I should’ve stuck to my research agenda, but no, I just had to go look at business headlines. There’s a debate on at The Economist over “Who benefits from financial innovation?” Nobel Prize winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz is arguing that financial innovation hasn’t been boosting economic growth but his position (which is mine) is currently in the minority.

The right kind of innovation obviously would help the financial sector fulfil its core functions; and if the financial sector fulfilled those functions better, and at lower cost, almost surely it would contribute to growth and societal well-being. But, for the most part, that is not the kind of innovation we have had.

In terms of that big question up there, the answer is found today on Bloomberg.com. If you answered “what is the vampire squid”,you’re absolutely right. The more relevant question appears to be what did that cost us? For that, I can only answer a lot and there’s more to come. Here’s the headline: Secret AIG Document Shows Goldman Sachs Minted Most Toxic CDOs.

Well, there’s your financial innovation for you.

So, the fun thing about the story is that the unlikely hero is Darrold Issa (Republican) member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform who “placed into the hearing record a five-page document itemizing the mortgage securities on which banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA had bought $62.1 billion in credit-default swaps from AIG.” Oddly enough,it appears that Issa may have not really known exactly what he had just disclosed. It didn’t really attract any attention at the time. Luckily, some one who knew something eventually looked at it. This was essentially a list of the deals that made AIG insolvent. These were also the deals that the government basically bought when it rescued AIG.

The document Issa made public cuts to the heart of the controversy over the September 2008 AIG rescue by identifying specific securities, known as collateralized-debt obligations, that had been insured with the company. The banks holding the credit-default swaps, a type of derivative, collected collateral as the insurer was downgraded and the CDOs tumbled in value.

The public can now see for the first time how poorly the securities performed, with losses exceeding 75 percent of their notional value in some cases. Compounding this, the document and Bloomberg data demonstrate that the banks that bought the swaps from AIG are mostly the same firms that underwrote the CDOs in the first place.

Here’s an even more interesting analysis from a legal standpoint. I know the deal was shady, I just have never known exactly if shady=unethical=illegal. The devil is truly in the details placed into public record by Issa.

The identification of securities in the document, known as Schedule A, and data compiled by Bloomberg show that Goldman Sachs underwrote $17.2 billion of the $62.1 billion in CDOs that AIG insured — more than any other investment bank. Merrill Lynch & Co., now part of Bank of America Corp., created $13.2 billion of the CDOs, and Deutsche Bank AG underwrote $9.5 billion.

These tallies suggest a possible reason why the New York Fed kept so much under wraps, Professor James Cox of Duke University School of Law says: “They may have been trying to shield Goldman — for Goldman’s sake or out of macro concerns that another investment bank would be at risk.”

Okay, so we know who we’re speaking of when Cox says the New York Fed, right? That would be Treasury Secretary Timmy-really-in-the-well-this-time Geithner. Bloomberg is going as far as to label his actions a cover-up. I frankly think that looks like a mild charge. Interestingly enough, an earlier version of the information was released by AIG but the counterparty names were redacted at the time. Chris Dodd’s committee had requested the information. Without the names–or more truthfully the frequency of ONE name in particular–you can’t really see much of a conspiracy.

What this detailed list shows–because the names are now out there along with the deals–is that the very same folks that underwrote the original toxic securities were the same folks that went to AIG to bet against them. It doesn’t look like they were hedging or placing insurance on their risk which would be natural and understandable transactions. It appears they fully knew the securities were bad and were preparing to make money by placing offsetting bets. This activity could only be determined if you saw the names of the counterparties next to the deals themselves. So, the appropriate document to list the information on would be a Schedule A. AIG released a schedule A for several years during the crisis, but without some of the most relevant details. We know now that this was at the request of the NY Fed (aka Tim–I’ve got GS on speed dial–Geithner).

In late November 2008, the insurer was planning to include Schedule A in a regulatory filing — until a lawyer for the Fed said it wasn’t necessary, according to the e-mails. The document was an attachment to the agreement between AIG and Maiden Lane III, the fund that the Fed established in November 2008 to hold the CDOs after the swap contracts were settled.

AIG paid its counter­parties — the banks — the full value of the contracts, after accounting for any collateral that had been posted, and took the devalued CDOs in exchange. As requested by the New York Fed, AIG kept the bank names out of the Dec. 24 filing and edited out a sentence that said they got full payment.

The New York Fed’s January 2010 statement said the sentence was deleted because AIG technically paid slightly less than 100 cents on the dollar.

Before the New York Fed ordered AIG to pay the banks in full, the company was trying to negotiate to pay off the credit- default swaps at a discount or “haircut.”

Read that date. We’re talking November 2008. If you read further into the Bloomberg article you’ll see that the names were withheld also during 2009. Issa put the names out because he wanted to show U.S. taxpayers where their money went. It’s unclear to me if he understood then or maybe even now that by putting out the details of the deals, he’s basically provided information that let’s us know how deeply Goldman Sachs was in on the financial innovations that blew up the economy. Not only that, it appears they knowingly may have been loading some of those innovations with assets they knew would explode and that they were actively placing bets on that outcome at AIG. As of the end of January, 2010 meeting, Geithner and the NY Fed still didn’t want the details released. No fucking wonder!

Janet Tavakoli, founder of Tavakoli Structured Finance Inc., a Chicago-based consulting firm, says the New York Fed’s secrecy has helped hide who’s responsible for the worst of the disaster. “The suppression of the details in the list of counterparties was part of the coverup,” she says.

E-mails between Fed and AIG officials that Issa released in January show that the efforts to keep Schedule A under wraps came from the New York Fed. Revelation of the messages contributed to the heated atmosphere at the House hearing.

…

Tavakoli also says that the poor performance of the underlying securities (which are actually specific slices or tranches of CDOs) shows they were toxic in the first place and were probably replenished with bundles of mortgages that were particularly troubled. Managers who oversee CDOs after they are created have discretion in choosing the mortgage bonds used to replenish them.

“The original CDO deals were bad enough,” Tavakoli says. “For some that allow reinvesting or substitution, any reasonable professional would ask why these assets were being traded into the portfolio. The Schedule A shows that we should be investigating these deals.”

So, check this out.

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, who delivered a report on the AIG bailout in November, says he’s not finished. He has begun a probe of why his office wasn’t provided all of the 250,000 pages of documents, including e-mails and phone logs, that Issa’s committee received from the New York Fed.

Okay, now, follow closely as I connect the dots to this one: U.S. Treasury loan plan may exclude TARP watchdog.

If you were Timothy Geithner, would you want Neil Barofsky poking around any more programs? Wouldn’t you be highly interested in controlling TARP oversight? No wonder Treasury officials and others have been after Barofsky for some time. (Here’s an outline of their actions and attempts to remove independency by Glenn Greenwald at Salon from last summer. )

Bottom line:

Geithner basically knew the vampire squid was a huge contributor to the fall of AIG. It looks like he may have actively encouraged covering-up that information. It also looks like GS actively securitized mortgages it knew would fail eventually and made huge counterbets based on that information using AIG as its personal bookie. Then, when AIG couldn’t cover the bets, GS refused to negotiate any deals (they must’ve known something like a bail out was forthcoming). Then knew exactly what was in those securities so they knew their real value. Geithner made AIG pay GS 100% of the value when it appears they were worth around 35%. When AIG tried to report the counterparties, the NY FED told them to withhold the information. (Yet, post Timmy, the NY FED appears to have released everything to Issa’s committee. During Timmy’s time, remember, everything was heavily edited and Barofsky appears not to have gotten the same information.) They also were told not to provide details on the mark downs. Timmy must’ve known that Goldman was betting against the toxic assets they had created. Not only that, it looks like Goldman was actually shorting themselves! AND these guys were Obama’s major contributors. Giethner must’ve been part of the packaged deal.

I got one thing to say now. A lot of folks should be doing a perp walk on this one. This looks like fraud. If this is the kind’ve financial innovation these folks voting on The Economist poll want, then they should just as well turn their life savings over to Bernie Madoff right now. I just wish they’d stop giving the likes of him mine too.

(I hope I’ve explained this adequately, cause this sure is one fucking twisted tale.)

Morphing the Conversation

Posted: February 7, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Global Financial Crisis, Team Obama, The Great Recession | Tags: , , , , , | Comments Off on Morphing the Conversation

One of the things that I’ve found profoundly upsetting about the last several decades is how successfully movement conservatism has confused and morphed policy conversation into a mishmash of labels which in no way describe what used to be general understanding of policy. Movement conservatism has reframed many definitions that were used as the basis for policy discourse. In a reaction to this, movement progressivism has reframed the reframe rather than try to shift the conversation back to what used to be common ground and common definitions. The terms “socialism”, “liberal”, and “Keynesian” are now completely divorced from reality–if I can use that word–and from their traditional meanings. Shared definitions and discussion of one’s assumptions are important for civil debate. Civil debate is necessary for successful policy implementation. Our discourse is so inflamed these day that we no longer even share the process by which we have historically entered into dialogue. Screaming ill-defined frames is now de rigueur.

Movement conservatism–its media outlets and thinktanks– has moved the Overton Window so far off the ruler that even former Reagan officials are coming forward to press the reset button. Movement progressivism has borrowed from their play book and is now doing the same. Several TC readers have brought up some really good examples recently.

My personal hypothesis is that both Democrats and Republicans have the same agenda which is to feed the hand of the industries and interests that can keep them in power. They play on different teams with different sponsors but their basic goals are the same. That would be to return money to people that provide money to them. The rhetoric we see in ads and speeches are positioned to keep us on the hook and tagging along. Ever so often they throw us a few things like a study on getting rid of DADT or a law that looks like it may get rid of job place discrimination. These are mostly symbolic and have very little real effect. The right does the same thing. They throw a few restrictions on abortion rights or pull together funds for an government agency that lets churches proselytize through social services. Nothing changes in the big policy realm except the continuation of laws that concentrate media, economic, and political power into the power brokers of each party’s choice. This is something that many of the ‘tea-partiers’ as well as those drawn to the move-on movement share; a sense that government moves when one set of interests that fund politicians asks it to do so. We get wars when the Oil industry needs its interests protected. We get bail outs when the finance industry needs its interests protected. Meanwhile, the rest of us get fed hype that something is happening in our best interests as they reframe discourse with their best Madison Avenue gestalt.

Yesterday, I tried to approach this problem from the sociopolitical concepts. Today, because of some down thread links folks pointed out, I’m going to switch to the socioeconomic. I tag these things with ‘socio’ on the front, because I do believe that most of this comes from differences in class more than differences in anything else. Today’s populists are spewing the words ‘elite’ when I think what they are really sensing is they are far removed from the bonus class of Wall Street, the political class in Washington, and the cultural class in Hollywood. There is nothing elite about them other than their ability to attract money and power through a velvet schmooze and a public platform.

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Barack Hoover Obama and the Curse of the Long Term Unemployment Rate

Posted: January 26, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Global Financial Crisis, Populism, president teleprompter jesus, The Bonus Class, The Great Recession | Tags: , , | Comments Off on Barack Hoover Obama and the Curse of the Long Term Unemployment Rate

When I wrote the morning thread at The Confluence last night, I couldn’t imagine any justification for an economic policy proscription of spending freezes coming from any one except maybe the American Enterprise Institute. Basic macroeconomic theory states that during a recession with high unemployment, the government’s fiscal policy should either consist of tax cuts or spending increases. Theory also shows that during these horrible times, budget deficits grow naturally through automatic stabilizers. Tax receipts go down because folks lose their jobs and businesses lose customers. Government spending goes up because unemployed people rely heavily on social safety net programs like unemployment insurance.

There really are no philosophical differences between conservative or liberal economists on these theories. What you usually see are arguments from both sides on which policy prescription to apply. Republicans favor tax cuts. Democrats usually go for increased spending that targets job creation. That’s been the way it’s been for a long time until THIS President who appears to believe he can rewrite economic theory the way a fundamentalist preacher rewrites geology, anthropology, cosmology, biology, and reality.

I woke up to a chorus of Barack Hoover Obama this morning coming from Economic Blogs all over the web.  It is here from Paul Krugman.

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

It is here from Brad Delong who mentions that even deficit hawk economics find this a laughable policy.

There are two ways to look at this. The first is that this is simply another game of Dingbat Kabuki. Non-security discretionary spending is some $500 billion a year. It ought to be growing at 5% per year in nominal terms (more because we are in a deep recession and should be pulling discretionary spending forward from the future as fast as we can)–that’s only $25 billion a year in a $3 trillion budget and a $15 trillion economy.

But in a country as big as this one even this is large stakes. What we are talking about is $25 billion of fiscal drag in 2011, $50 billion in 2012, and $75 billion in 2013. By 2013 things will hopefully be better enough that the Federal Reserve will be raising interest rates and will be able to offset the damage to employment and output. But in 2011 GDP will be lower by $35 billion–employment lower by 350,000 or so–and in 2012 GDP will be lower by $70 billion–employment lower by 700,000 or so–than it would have been had non-defense discretionary grown at its normal rate. (And if you think, as I do, that the federal government really ought to be filling state budget deficit gaps over the next two years to the tune of $200 billion per year…)

And what do we get for these larger output gaps and higher unemployment rates in 2011 and 2012? Obama “signal[s] his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit,” Jackie Calmes reports.

As one deficit-hawk journalist of my acquaintance says this evening, this is a perfect example of fundamental unseriousness: rather than make proposals that will actually tackle the long-term deficit–either through future tax increases triggered by excessive deficits or through future entitlement spending caps triggered by excessive deficits–come up with a proposal that does short-term harm to the economy without tackling the deficit in any serious and significant way.

Here’s more from Mark Thoma and one from Naked Capitalism. That’s just some of the more high profile economist blogs. I didn’t even go for the dozens of links from business bloggers or the political sites. I want to put this all in perspective and I’ll use a Jan. 16 article from The Economist to do so. It’s one of the latest articles I intend to use in my classes and it’s called The Trap.

When teaching about unemployment statistics, economics professors like Krugman, Thoma, DeLong, and little ol’ me all emphasize that it’s not the big rate so much as the underlying trends and details within the rate that drive a policy. Cyclical unemployment–the type of unemployment that comes from a recession–eventually clears up on its own when the economy improves. Usually, the folks impacted by cyclical employment will not have problems finding jobs in a good economy.

There are some pervasive types of unemployment that are much more deeply rooted and take more targeted, specific job policies to eliminate. Structural unemployment is one of those phenomena that take job retraining programs or helping the labor force move where the jobs are being created (either location or industry change). You can usually spot this type of unemployment in the Long Term Unemployment Rate. These folks have been in industries or jobs that are no longer valid in the modern economy and without some refitting, they stay unemployed. If you look at the graph I posted above from The Economist, you’ll see exactly how disturbed the labor market really is right now. This unemployment is not going away and it requires some serious policy to deal with it. Until then, we will see lower tax receipts and higher need for safety net programs. Obama’s policy totally ignores the reality on the ground and goes for a quick political message. We’re not seeing solutions for the real problem at all.

The Economist article calls this the ‘curse’ of long term unemployment. This is the real problem left to this administration from the Bush years. Other than shove the young unemployed into the military, there has been no program aimed at the lackluster job creation coming from the U.S. economy since Bill Clinton left office.

THE 2000s—the Noughts, some call them—turned out to be jobless. Only about 400,000 more Americans were employed in December 2009 than in December 1999, while the population grew by nearly 30m. This dismal rate of job creation raises the distinct possibility that America’s recovery from the latest recession may also be jobless. The economy almost certainly expanded during the second half of 2009, but 800,000 additional jobs were lost all the same.

It took four solid years for employment to regain its peak after the 2001 recession. With jobs so scarce, wages stagnated even as the cost of living rose, forcing households to borrow to maintain their standard of living. According to Raghuram Rajan, an economist at the University of Chicago, this set the stage for the most recent crisis and recession—a crisis, ultimately, caused by household indebtedness. If the current recovery is indeed jobless, wages will continue to lag. Since they are now virtually unable to borrow, households will have to make do with less, and reduced spending is likely to make the economic recovery more uncertain still.

So which is it to be: jobless or job-full? Of paramount concern is the growth in long-term unemployment. Around four in every ten of the unemployed—some 6m Americans—have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. That is the highest rate since this particular record began, in 1948. These workers may forget their skills; and many began with few skills anyway. Just as troubling is a drop of 1.5m in the civilian labour force (which excludes unemployed workers who have stopped looking for work). That is unprecedented in the post-war period. If those who have stopped looking were counted, the unemployment rate would be much higher.

The only sectors that have been growing recently are the health care industry (like demand for nurses) and the education sector. I can tell you as a participant in the education sector, state-level balanced budget requirements are about to change those statistics. Both the Health and Education sectors require government funding, if that dries up, the jobs dry up even though the demand remains high.

The Obama administration has been verbal about green sector jobs, but frankly, jobs are not going to come from ethanol subsidies, that’s only going to create food shortages. The basic question, then, is where do the jobs come from, and what policies do we use to encourage job creation? It is obvious that our infrastructure needs a huge amount of rework to me and like FDR, this is one area where we could start programs to rebuild interstates, networks, and buildings. Just refitting buildings to meet earthquake or hurricane standards could be one potential area. We also don’t have enough refineries and power plants. It is possible we could subsidize the private sector in major infrastructure projects if there’s no will for a public work project. All of the highways, dams, and electrical grids are aging and in need of repair. We’ve seen realization of these problems but no policy prescriptions.

Where are the jobs of the future and how can government create an environment for their creation if we defund job training and education and fail to fully fund repairs to the infrastructure that supports job creation in the future?  Do we really need a spending freeze in this jobless century? Where are the real economists in this administration?

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