Editorial: Obama Recovery Still Feeble After Two Years - IBD Editorial
But the fact is that the Obama recovery is one of the worst ever. Certainly the worst since the Great Depression. It's so bad, in fact, that even 24 months after the recession officially ended there are few places beyond the stock market and corporate profits that have shown much, if any, improvement. A few examples:
• Jobs: The number of people with jobs has barely changed since June 2009 — up just 0.4%.
• Unemployment: While the unemployment rate has dropped a bit, the number of long-term unemployed is up by a third, and the average length of unemployment is now a staggering 38 weeks.
• Earnings: Median weekly earnings are down slightly between Q3 2009 and Q1 2011, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Housing prices: The National Association of Realtors reports that median price for existing home sales dropped 10% since June 2009.
• Gas prices: Pump prices climbed 52% over the past two years, according to the Department of Energy.
Pro-Obama media always shocked by bad economic news - Michael Barone
Unexpectedly!
As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.
"New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported CNBC.com May 25.
"Personal consumption fell," Business Insider reported the same day, "when it was expected to rise."
"Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month," Reuters reported May 25, "worse than economists' expectations."
"Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall," headlined Bloomberg News May 19.
"U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April," wrote the Wall Street Journal May 18.
Those examples are all from the last two weeks. Reynolds has been linking to similar items since October 2009.
Obama’s worst nightmare: The slow economy slows some more - Jennifer Rubin
The Wall Street Journal headline reads, “May Data Indicate Slowdown.” Many Americans didn’t know things had previously picked up. The economic picture is, in any event, far from rosy:The U.S. manufacturing sector slowed sharply in May, according to data released Wednesday by the Institute for Supply Management. Price pressures lessened.The job picture is alarming as well. “Private-sector jobs in the U.S. rose by just 38,000 last month. . . . Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had expected [payroll giant Automatic Data Processing Inc.] to report a much larger job gain of 190,000 last month. The April data were revised to show a rise of 177,000 versus 179,000 first reported.”
Separately, private businesses barely added jobs in May as large companies cut workers, according to a report released Wednesday. The news is sure to raise further fears about the second-quarter U.S. economy.
The ISM’s manufacturing purchasing managers’ index fell to 53.5 in May from 60.4 in April. Readings above 50 indicate expanding activity.
All of that comes on top of gloomy data from the housing market.
Stocks Fall 279 Points—Mainstream Media, Google Search: It Didn’t Happen? - Rovin
But, let’s give credit where credit’s due. Patrick Allen posted this story at CNBC dot com with a title that just has to have the liberal media cringing:“Horror for US Economy as Data Falls off Cliff”
Adding another post by Reuters that CNBC posted to their site, (and dared to mention “a failed stimulus”), might be a recipe to call into action President Obama’s “rapid response coordinator” Jesse Lee, (see Morrissey’s related post), to put a stop to what Douglas Borthwick calls “a sugar-high wearing out”:The sugar high that has buoyed the U.S. economy over the past six months is wearing out, and there is little in economic growth or foundation to show for it,” said Douglas Borthwick, a managing director with Faros Trading in Stamford, Connecticut.
In a related story that had to be found across the pond, Nile Gardiner at the Telegraph filed this story, (including a quote from none other than the New York Times’ Robert Reich) that will (most likely) never be written by an American Liberal News Agency:Why Barack Obama may be heading for electoral disaster in 2012
By Nile Gardiner
……Ultimately, the 2012 presidential election will be decided by the state of the economy, and new data released this week makes grim reading for the White House. In fact you cannot watch a US financial news network at the moment, from Bloomberg to CNBC to Fox Business, without a great deal of pessimism about the dire condition of the world’s biggest economy. 66 percent of Americans now worry the federal government will run out of money in the face of towering public debts.
After 29 months of the most left-wing presidency in US history, the American superpower is heading towards the economic abyss - Nile Gardiner
Under President Obama unemployment has remained above 8 percent for every single month, with the exception of January 2009 when he entered the Oval Office, rising as high as 10.1 percent in October 2009. By any measure, this is a terrible track record, and as even The New York Times acknowledged earlier this week, “no American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.”
The dire jobs figures are just part of an extraordinarily grim picture for the US economy, nearly two and a half years into the Obama presidency. As ABC News reported yesterday, “a cascade of negative economic reports this week is leaving Americans wondering if this is really a recovery from the recession that officially started December 2007 and ended June 2009.” And the housing market, in which 67 percent of Americans have a stake, is in serious trouble, with home prices sinking to their lowest levels since 2002, falling by 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2011 and for eight straight months in a row.
US house price fall 'beats Great Depression slide' - Stephen Foley
The ailing US housing market passed a grim milestone in the first quarter of this year, posting a further deterioration that means the fall in house prices is now greater than that suffered during the Great Depression.
The brief recovery in prices in 2009, spurred by government aid to first-time buyers, has now been entirely snuffed out, and the average American home now costs 33 per cent less than it did at the peak of the housing bubble in 2007. The peak-to-trough fall in house prices in the 1930s Depression was 31 per cent – and prices took 19 years to recover after that downturn.
The latest Case-Shiller house price index was just one of a slew of disappointing economic data from the US yesterday, which suggested ebbing confidence in the recovery of the world's largest economy. The Chicago PMI manufacturing index showed a sharp slowdown in the pace of expansion in May, missing Wall Street forecasts and sending the index to its lowest since November 2009.
Employers add fewest jobs in eight months; unemployment jumps to 9.1 percent - Brady Dennis and Neil Irwin
Employers added 54,000 jobs in May, the Labor Department said Friday, down from 232,000 in April. The unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent from 9 percent. That deterioration in the labor market marks only the latest in a slew of recent signs that the economic recovery is losing momentum.
It is the second time that growth has stumbled; a similar scenario played out last summer, reflecting the long, uneven process of clawing out of a recession spurred by a financial crisis.
Employers from coast to coast describe a situation in which tepid economic growth alone isn’t enough to prompt them to add to their payrolls. Sales have been rising, but slowly and tenuously. Doubts about the future have continued to chip away at confidence and prevented many business people from taking the leap of faith required to expand and hire new workers.
