Hot Topics:
Get alerts when there is a new article that might interest you.
It is no easy thing to peer through the fog of recent economic data. Confidence that the economic recovery would accelerate ran into a not-so-good job report Friday. To the chagrin of the president's reelection campaign team, only 121,000 workers were added to private sector payrolls in March, far below expectations, and only about half the previous month's total. The unemployment rate ticked down from 8.3 percent to 8.2 percent, but only because fewer people were seeking work. The Federal Reserve Board's monetary policy gurus are confirmed in their view that it is too soon to tighten policy, and those who have been calling for even looser policy, a QE3, will once again raise their voices.
The unexpectedly weak jobs report caused worries to resurface that had recently been relegated to the background. Fears that the recession hitting the eurozone would have a negative impact on the U.S. economy are again on the rise, after being overlooked in the pre-jobs report euphoria. Spain's difficulty in persuading investors to buy its latest IOUs and news that the eurozone's problems have spread from the area's periphery to so-called core countries such as the Netherlands and France are again prominently featured in news reports. It is clear that the austerity medicine prescribed by Dr. Angela Merkel is killing her patients, from Greece to Spain to Portugal to Italy, making at least the Greeks wonder whether they should seek a cure for their ills outside the eurozone. Should they do that, most Germans are promising to wish them a not-so-fond farewell.
Still, one month of jobs data is not a trend, especially when we are dealing with data affected by seasonal weather factors and subject to revision. On the bright side we have several developments that might prove more consequential in the long run than one month's slow growth in job creation.
First is what is called the re-shoring of jobs: bringing home jobs that have been sent to China. Wages in China are rising rapidly as the regime seeks to avoid greater social unrest by giving workers a larger share of the profits from the nation's massive exports. Meanwhile, American manufacturers have sweated the fat out of their operations, bringing costs more in line with those in China. Partly because of tax incentives, partly because it has upped its efficiency, G.E. is bringing home jobs in its appliance-making operations. On a lesser scale we have Master Lock. President Obama used its unionized plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as a photo-op backdrop to congratulate the company for bringing 100 jobs back from China. This trend, if indeed it is a trend, is unlikely to bring home all or even most of the jobs lost to other countries, but it is brightening the employment outlook in manufacturing, a sector that added 37,000 jobs last month.
U.S. firms are also doing better in their competition with European firms. Three academic researchers, Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, Raffaella Sadun of the Harvard Business School, and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics, report that U.S. multinationals obtain higher productivity from investment in information technology (IT) than non-U.S. multinationals due to "tougher people management""”promotions, rewards, hiring, and firing bad performers"”techniques of U.S. companies. This reverses "the long-standing catch-up of Europe's productivity level with the United States."
Three sectors providing more good news are retailing, autos, and, surprise, housing. Retailers are reporting better than expected sales, either because Easter comes earlier this year or because consumers are attracted to the new, bright fashions or because warmer weather earlier in the year brought forward sales that would ordinarily be wrung up about now. We should know next month whether good sales figures in February were "borrowed" from March.
Vehicle sales in March were the highest in five years. Because of deferred purchases, the fleet now on the road is rattlingly old"”10 years on average. The attractiveness of new, fuel-efficient, technology-intensive vehicles rolling off production lines is adding to the incentive of $4 gasoline to persuade consumers to give up their clunkers. Sales of small cars are growing, but even owners of SUVs are finding that by trading in their old trucks for newer models they can cut their gasoline costs in half. Only sales of electric vehicles, Obama's vehicle of choice for others, lag. Little wonder: It would take an estimated 26 years to recover the added cost of Chevy Volt when compared with a tradition version of the same model.
Page 1 of 2
1 | 2
Article TAGS:
A Champion Named "¦ Bubba
Poll: Support for Supreme Court Up Since Obamacare Arguments
United Arab Emirates Company Profits from DOE Loan Guarantee
Not in Decline
Browse 15 Years of the Weekly Standard
Read more...
A Parody
Read more...
A parody.
Read more...
A Parody
Read more...
View more [+]
From The Scrapbook
Read more...
From the Scrapbook.
Read more...
From The Scrapbook
Read more...
View more [+]
A lively dissection of confident predictions in politics.
What does the Tea Party mean?
A film without pretension about warriors as heroes.
Just how dangerous are low doses of radiation?
Is Lucretius the gateway to the modern world?
Oregon's capital of cool and the downside of hipness.
The rich get richer and the poor are broken.
View more [+]
Read Full Article »