June Jobs Tell A Bad Story -- And Obama's Policies Won't Help
By Lawrence Kudlow
July 3, 2009
After nine months of explosive monetary and fiscal stimulus, you'd think economic recovery would be upon us. But the June jobs report tells a much different story.
Non-farm payrolls fell by 467,000, as the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent. This isn't nearly as bad as the 700,000 monthly job losses of last winter, but it's still a rough number. Equally disappointing is the household survey -- often a key turning-point signal since it captures the health of small businesses -- which has dropped 811,000 in the past two months.
Donald Marron, a former senior economist with the Council of Economic Advisors and the CBO, calls it "a grim jobs report." Marron, digging deep into the Labor Department Statistics, says the continued decline in hours worked by private-sector employees, now 7 percent over the past year, is especially troublesome. He writes, "The economy is thus losing jobs and, for the jobs that remain, is losing hours worked. That double-whammy is bad news for the economy."
I would add that along with manufacturing and construction, the service sector continues to shed jobs, with a 244,000 drop in June. Inside that category, the important professional and business-services sector lost 118,000 jobs. The wage data is equally disconcerting. Over the past three months, average hourly earnings barely rose at 0.7 percent annually.
There are still some bright spots that strongly suggest the recession has bottomed. The ISM manufacturing report for June held a number of positives. Auto sales, retail sales and home sales look to be bottoming. And May factory orders climbed as inventories crashed. So businesses, including automakers, may be increasing production in the months ahead.
In fact, even while second-quarter real gross domestic product is expected to fall by 1 percent to 2 percent annually -- much better than the 6 percent declines of recent quarters -- the third quarter could show a small positive GDP score. Much smaller GDP subtraction from inventories, housing and business cap-ex bodes statistically well for growth.
But there won't be a real recovery until jobs start rising. The unemployment rate is a lagging indicator. But jobs are the most important coincident indicator of the economy. Until they turn around, nobody should expect anything resembling real economic growth.
Leading indicators -- especially monetary, financial and credit-market signals -- are flashing "go" for future growth. The Fed has pumped roughly $1 trillion into the economy since last August. Key money-supply measures are growing at 10 percent to 15 percent annually. Short-term rates are near zero. The Treasury curve is steeply upward-sloping. Corporate-bond-market spreads have declined significantly. And commodity prices are off their lows. This is all good.
But for all the Fed's stimulus, which has had a salutary effect on the banking crisis, the lags are long and variable. And as former Dallas Fed head Robert McTeer has written, much of the central bank's balance-sheet expansion is being hoarded by commercial banks, with banks holding about $800 billion more than what they're required to hold. Until these excess reserves come way down, the impact of the Fed's monetary stimulus will be more muted than has traditionally been the case in Milton Freidman's monetarist model.
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