I'm more optimistic than I was a month and a half ago,
One good month based on a swing in the C.P.I. does nothing to change this negative trajectory.
Clearly, Katrina hasn't shown up in the jobless claims yet, but it will, ... Next month, we're going to be looking at one of the largest one month negative spikes in the history of this series, going back to the '30s.
The job market is slowly tightening. We are wringing out the slack. But we're only six months into a process that could take a year and a half.
My problem with the Bush plan is that it's so ideologically problematic that now these guys are going to have to argue about it for a month or two. That's bad because we need to inject stimulus into the economy quickly.
Given the growth of the population and labor force and improvements in productivity, we need to be adding somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 jobs per month to nudge unemployment down.
Our expectations have been pretty diminished. A good month used to be 300,000 more jobs and now it is 200,000.
There were close to 200,000 jobs cut in the past couple of months, making them the worst two months of last year. The jobless recovery is not only lingering, it's deepening.