Tag Archives: jobs

More About Jobs

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Last week, in a presage of the nearby future, Alpha Natural Resources, a major coal producer, announced that it would be forced to reduce production by 16 million tons of coal per year, which will force the closure of eight mines in Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and the elimination of some 1200 mining jobs—400 of these miners right away.

There are two reasons for this trouble.  One is long-run beneficial and is simply part of the creative destruction that a free economy goes through—quickly and with greater strength on the other side, including for those whose jobs are lost in the near-term, if the economy is free from government interference.

This reason is the improving technology that makes natural gas more cheaply extractable than coal.

But the other reason is government interference.  Kevin Crutchfield, ANR’s CEO, puts it plainly and simply at the feet of the government’s

regulatory environment that’s aggressively aimed at constraining the use of coal.

And make no mistake about it; this is a deliberate policy.  Here’s what the then-and-now Democratic Presidential Candidate had to say about coal production back in 2008:

If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them[.]

It’s important to note that Obama’s policies really are anti-coal—and so, intended or not, anti-job—and not just ANR’s bad fortune or failure to operate cleanly.  As Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito (R, WV) points out,

The president’s extreme policies are crippling entire towns and making it harder for workers to find jobs.  Because of  the president’s War on Coal, thousands of West Virginia families have to worry about where their next paycheck is going to come from.

Is the EPA well-intended, but misguided?  Not a bit of it.  The timetable for meeting its new standards is virtually impossible to meet, and the standards themselves unattainable.

But it’s alright.  All those unemployed coal miners will have clean air.  Just no money for food on their families’ tables, or for rent/mortgage payments with which to keep roofs over their families’ heads.

Pity the Poor Union

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The Chicago Teacher’s Union, which is unhappy and feeling rushed.

Using the children its teachers claim to teach as hostages, the union has decided to continue its strike for more money, more job security, and less stringent individual teacher performance evaluation.  Of course, this leaves those children out of school and forces parents to lose income from taking time off from work or to incur additional child-care expenses to handle children who should be in school.  That doesn’t matter, though, to teachers whose salaries already are some 50% higher than those of the parents whose children they’re not teaching.  (On the other hand, what’s the downside for the kids, really?  This collection of teachers does poorly by the students: a 60% high school graduation rate, generally, and a 44% rate for black high schoolers.  Just 15% of fourth graders are proficient in reading.  Just 20% of the students are grade level proficient in math.)

But faced with a generous offer from the city to come back to work, the CTU declined even to vote on the offer over the weekend.

CTU President, Karen Lewis, said teachers wanted the opportunity to continue to discuss that offer.

Our members are not happy,

she said.

They want to know if there is anything more they can get,

she said.

They feel rushed,

!?  she said.

They want to squeeze more—as if their already failed performance should be rewarded.  Talk about not hurting (teachers’) self-esteem.  They feel rushed?  They always could come back to work and study the city’s offer at leisure.

In the meantime, the kids are suffering.  Or, maybe not so much.

The Federal Bank of US Taxpayer

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In a new Bernanke hair-brained scheme, the Federal Reserve Bank said last week that it is going to quantitatively “ease” by buying mortgage-backed securities from the private economy, to the tune of $40 billion worth per month.  Nearly half a trillion dollars each year.  And it’s open-ended, meaning the Fed has no plan—no idea, really—of when it might stop.

Bernanke says this is necessary.

If the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially, the committee will continue its purchase of agency mortgage-backed securities, undertake additional asset purchases, and employ its other policy tools as appropriate until such improvement is achieved in a context of price stability.

Bernanke then said, in all seriousness,

[This move will] assure the public that the Fed will remain accommodative long enough to ensure recovery.

We don’t have a single number that captures that, but we anticipate that we’ll have to do more and we’ll do enough to make sure the economy gets on the right track[.]

In other words, he doesn’t have a clue what his decision criterion should be, but he’s going to decide, anyway.  And more so, as time goes on and his nonexistent milestone isn’t met.

And

These actions, which together will increase the Committee’s holdings of longer-term securities by about $85 billion each month [including its existing long-bond buying “plan”] through the end of the year, should put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative[.]

There are a number of questions, though.

Why are we taxpayers being put on the hook for these private economy instruments?  If these securities are failing in our economy, why should the public have to pick up the tab?  If they aren’t failing, whence the need to take them off the banks’ hands?  What ever happened to free markets, responsibility, and accepting consequences, as well as reaping rewards?

And these questions:

The Fed has been artificially suppressing interest rates for the last three-plus years.  That suppression already has lowered my own mortgage rate from 6+% to nearly 3.5%.  What does Bernanke expect to gain from suppressing mortgage rates directly?  The inflation rate this year is 1.7% month on month, and 2% year on year through August.  The August interest rate on a one-year Treasury Note is 0.16%: he’s already suppressed interest rates to the point that we’re paying the government for the pleasure of lending it our money.  What does Bernanke expect to gain?

These artificially suppressed rates have a number of negative effects.  By distorting the market for debt instruments, the Fed is making it difficult, if not impossible, for investors accurately to assess value of the debt of borrowers—and so is making it unnecessarily difficult, and risky, to lend.  How does the Fed plan on redressing this failure?

By artificially suppressing interest rates, the Fed is actively and extensively damaging those who’re committed to, or dependent on, fixed income instruments, like bonds, for their income.  Folks like retirees.  How does the Fed plan on redressing this failure?

Savings accounts have become utterly useless—the interest rates here have been good approximations of zero for the last four years.  Savings accounts used to be an effective means through which financial institutions could accumulate funds for lending to borrowers—like home-buyers and businesses looking to expand their operations. How does the Fed plan on redressing this failure?

Our economy will recover, eventually.  And interest rates will rise.  Catastrophically, if all the money the Fed is pumping into our economy with…ideas…like this one drives inflation skyward.

On top of this, though, the Fed is creating another time bomb, one which it has no hope of controlling.  When interest rates rise, and the cost of borrowing goes up, for lending institutions as well as for borrowers, as the former search for funds to loan to the latter, those lenders still will be sitting on all those mortgage loans let at artificially low rates.  Those low rates in a healthy economy (let’s skip over the high inflation, high interest rate economy) will be far below then-market rates, and so those existing mortgages, mortgages with which the lender still will be stuck, will not be generating enough income for the lenders to continue to loan.  For up to 30 years in the mortgage market.  Can you say, “S&L bankruptcy?”

And, by the way, as Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker said Saturday,

Channeling the flow of credit to particular economic sectors is an inappropriate role for the Federal Reserve[.]

Or for any part of the government.

How’s That Working Out For You?

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Here are some more data on our economic condition:

  • US wholesale prices in August had the largest one-month gain in more than three years
  • The producer-price index, which measures how much manufacturers and wholesalers pay for finished goods, increased a seasonally adjusted 1.7% in August from July
  • Prices for intermediate goods—which are semifinished goods, like lumber or flour, that require further processing—grew 1.1% in August from July
  • Prices of raw materials increased 5.8% in August, suggesting prices for finished goods will rise further in the future
  • [I]nitial jobless claims were up 15,000 to a seasonally adjusted 382,000 in the week ended Sep 8.  Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had expected “only” 370,000 new applications

And these data [emphasis mine]:

The income of the typical US family has fallen to levels last seen in 1995.  Census Bureau said annual household income fell in 2011 for the fourth straight year to an inflation-adjusted $50,054.  …it will be a generation before Americans regain the peak income levels reached at the close of the ’90s

Here’s a graph of what that looks like:

Notice that: Not only is income much lower than the Evil Bush years, it’s still falling.

The monthlies are snapshots, and should be taken with a grain of salt, certainly.  But they also bear watching, especially in light of those falling incomes under the Obama administration, and the inflation trap his Fed chief, Ben Bernanke, is building in with all that dollar injection.

And the guy who sometimes sits in the President’s chair actually said this, as though he believed it,

[W]e have made progress digging our way out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression[.]

Jobs

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The latest Labor Department jobs report, as James Pethokoukis of AEIdeas noted, was especially dismal.  For one thing, there’s this:

The Labor Department also said that 41,000 fewer jobs were created in June and July than previously reported.  The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from 64,000 to 45,000, and the change for July was revised from 163,000 to 141,000.

These are very sharp downward corrections of initially erroneous (it turns out) numbers.  In fact, this initial coarse overestimation of job creation by Labor has become pretty commonplace this year.  Some might say that Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s Labor Department is trying to cook the books for their boss’ benefit.  I’m not convinced of that.  It seems more likely to me that our economic situation simply is so dismal that it’s much harder today for the government to collect reasonably accurate near-real time data than it was in past times.

Here are some ugly graphs that further illustrate the depths of our economic woes three and a half years on, and three years after the nominal end of this recession.

This graph, from Pethokoukis’ article, shows the sharp fall-off (I hesitate, so far, to call it a collapse) in labor force participation over the last dozen years.

Notice that.  The recession formally ended in spring 2009, yet, as The Wall Street Journal noted, participation has kept right on falling during these three years of recovery—an unprecedented decline in our history.  And to put a bit more perspective on this decline, see the next graph, from the same WSJ link:

We haven’t had so low a per centage of Americans trying to find work in 30 years.  And it took the last three years—three years during which we’re “recovering,” we’re “on the right path,” and “it just takes a bit more time,” as some have lately insisted—to sink to such a depth.

One more ugly picture.  Pethokoukis also cited a graph from The Hamilton Project that illustrates the “jobs gap” in our current economy.  (It’s an interactive graph at the Project; go over and play with it).  This gap, according to the Project, is the monthly number of jobs that the US economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while also absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month.

The 96,000 jobs in this graph is the increase the latest Labor report says we had for the month of August.  The other three lines represent, in decreasing order, the effect of steady increases of 472,000 jobs/mo (from the highest single month in this century), 321,000 jobs/mo (the average of the best year in the ’90s), and 208,000 jobs/mo (the average of the best year in the 2000s).

We’re not even keeping up.  To paraphrase Anderson Cooper, those insisting we’re “making progress” are in an alternate universe.