Jared Bernstein Looking Quotations

We're looking at a recession/jobless recovery that's two years old to the day.

Maybe we were looking under the wrong rock.

Maybe by the second quarter of next year, we'll be looking at some lower unemployment rate -- say in the 5 to 5.5 percent range, if we're lucky. But that would be the best to hope for, and it's based on our working through these excesses that persist.

I and others have been looking desperately for silver linings in this tragedy and if Katrina were to motivate Congress to look at this issue seriously, that would be great.

This report may give pause to some of the optimists looking for a stronger second half, ... We need a real boost if we're going to reverse some of these trends that are even more negative than we thought they were.

Firms have to be very concerned about rising prices. They're protecting their profit margins. They're going to be looking at every nook and cranny to absorb this increase.

Folks are coming back into the labor market, but they're not finding jobs there. The tepid pace of job growth was too low to keep unemployment from rising. We're looking at a fairly weak recovery, at least initially.

This is a pretty negative report. The reason unemployment ticked down is the labor force contracted. That suggests fewer people are getting into the game, looking for work, and that kind of discouragement can lead to a lower unemployment rate.

These top line numbers suggest we are into what's beginning to look like a jobless recovery. We simply can't drive unemployment down if we're only adding 30 or 40,000 jobs. So, basically, we're looking at a situation where the recovery is calling, but the labor market isn't really picking up the phone.

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.