Wall Street is up! Goldman Sachs is raking in the dough! Spread the good news. As for this story, it’s probably best to ignore it all together, because who wants to be a party pooper?
The U.S. manufacturing sector is clawing back from a deep downturn, and manufacturing globally is on the skids. The climb back will be long and painful because the situation facing the sector isn’t just bad. It’s awful.
The Federal Reserve’s latest measure of industrial output shows that in June, U.S. manufacturers were operating at 64.6 percent of their installed capacity. It means they are producing at more than a third below their potential, and this is the worst rate since these records began being kept in 1948. Since the recession began in December 2007, through last month, manufacturers shed 1.9 million jobs, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
Please note, the starting date of said recession: 2007. Personally I saw signs of a downturn much earlier than that, but I’m no fancy schmansy economist. But I will say this: it sure looks to me like we are headed for nuclear superpower status combined with third world economic conditions, where the rich make more and more, the poor get less and less, and the middle class essentially disappears. In other words, the Middle Ages (or Russia in the 1990’s)! But with cell phones and the internet! Whoo Hoo!
But at least Wall Street will still be in business, and really, what else matters? Thanks Big Ben Bernanke and Little Timmy Geithner and Larry “I’m an asshole and I still got to be Obama’s Economic adviser” Summers. You’ve made all this possible, along with the Blue Dogs in Congress, by resisting the progressive policies (like restructuring mortgages in bankruptcy, cutting credit card usury, etc.) that might have made a difference in resurrecting that part of our economy that produces tangible goods rather than CDO’s and CDS’s and all the other alphabet soup derivatives our Masters of the Universe call their “product line.” Sure Bush’s wars, tax cuts and deregulation of the financial industry combined with Alan Greenspan’s cheap money factory (otherwise known as the Federal Reserve) created the conditions that led to the real estate bubble that burst round the world, but throwing money at Wall Street doesn’t seem to have done much for the rest of us.
Mr. President, you’re a smart guy so please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve bought into some really dumb advice from your “best and brightest” economic fixers. We don’t need higher stock prices, we need jobs. Lots and lots of jobs. Jobs that pay enough to reinvigorate and expand the Great American Middle Class. Until we start seeing those jobs, all this blather about the recession ending doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.
I don’t quite get what you’re talking about, Steven. Obama keeps saying it’s not nearly over yet, that there’s a lot of pain still to come. The so-called stimulus packages are designed to create jobs, and are quite credible for that purpose.
Seems to me Obama is doing more than I, at least, expected, and doing most of it right. If you want to yell at somebody, yell at Congress and the “mainstream” media.
talking to the Ferry people down here, grown men are taking the teenagers’ jobs mowing lawns because nothing is available and tourism is way down.
Just watch CNBC and you would think the recession is gone. Honestly, you give me 0% money and I could make money in the stock market.
A job less recovery is not good.
It’s all how you see things or everything in in the perception thereof. OK, one, two, three times “The recession is over, the recession is over.” See how easy it all is. Oh, that pain in your stomach. Well, you just don’t have enough faith. What are you? Some kind of a Communist?
I couldn’t agree with you more Steven. Watch the jobs data. If we ever recover from this “downturn” those numbers will have to soar. Here in Mich. folks are holding their breath as unemployment checks are starting to run out for some, many more on the horizon. As the Big Three try to recover some momentum from drastic downsizing and hopefully better offerings, the unasked question is; who will buy the cars? That one causes some tossing and turning in the middle of the night for this guy. Where I go to shop, or have a meal or get a haircut I see fewer people than last year, and a lot fewer people than 05-06.
I’m no economist either, but the stock market is betting that the worst is over. Some indicators show some flattening of the downward spiral which may in fact be a result of “stimulus” money coming into play. If that doesn’t start to lead to job creation, we are royally screwed I’m afraid.
I agree completely. Whenever I hear some idiot on BLOOMBERG (I never watch CNBC anymore) talking about some “recovery” coming about by the end of the year, I literally end up screaming at the tv.
If there’ a “jobless recovery” then what exactly is recovering and how? If double-digit unemployment is the new normal, then how is that a recovery? So maybe the DOW doesn’t plummet but ends up treading water for a few years.
And how is that a recovery?