From cnbc.com: The Jobs Puzzle Bernanke Can’t Solve
It’s a mystery that has puzzled even U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke: if the U.S. economy is growing rapidly, why isn’t it creating jobs?
And so, let us hear from the wisest man in the land….
Bernanke offered two possible explanations.
“One is that maybe the recession was deeper than we thought,” he said in response to a question from a member of Congress last week. “The other is that the productivity gains
were greater than we thought they would be when firms were able to cut their work forces and still maintain output.”
These blundering fools need to get out of their bubble and walk on land for a month or so. Perhaps that will zap those silly question marks [????] that are floating over their statistically driven heads. If they looked into the reality of household income vs household budgets, it doesn’t take an economic scholar to see what the problem is.
The problem is the continued requirement of billion dollar profits for corporations to compete on Wall Street. Those billions of dollars continue to be pulled from middle class pocketbooks in the form of overly inflated prices on the spectrum of basic needs: housing, banking, food, utilities, healthcare, transportation, childcare, elder care, etc. There is no money floating around in the middle layers of this economy that would inspire small business to be created. The booming industries — well take a look:
From this 2009 Forbes.com article:
Sales / Profits / Assets (in Billions)1 General Electric 182.52 / 17.41 / 797.77
4 ExxonMobil 425.70 / 45.22 / 228.05
7 AT&T 124.03 / 12.87 / 265.25
8 Wal-Mart Stores 405.61 / 13.40 / 163.43
9 Chevron 255.11 / 23.93 / 161.17
16 JPMorgan Chase 101.49 / 3.70 / 2,175.05
19 Berkshire Hath 107.79 / 4.99 / 267.40
22 Procter & Gamble 83.68 / 14.08 / 138.26
24 Verizon 97.35 / 6.43 / 202.35
28 IBM 103.63 / 12.34 / 109.53
36 Hewlett-Packard 118.70 / 8.05 / 109.63
38 Bank of America 113.11 / 4.01 / 1,817.94
42 Johnson & Johnson 63.75 / 12.95 / 84.91
49 Microsoft 61.98 / 17.23 / 65.79
50 Pfizer 48.30 / 8.10 / 111.15
It’s unbelievable to think that our economy is the hands of people who don’t have a clue what is really going on. If Ben Bernanke is scratching his head in puzzlement, we are big trouble.
Certainly our financial sector has grown disproportionately large since 1980, but I can’t say whether the profits of GE, Exxon, AT&T, and Wal-Mart are out of line.
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p>What is clear is that it is possible to have positive growth in GDP even while the economy sheds jobs or nets no new jobs. I believe this is well-known among economists so it would surprise me that was news to Bernanke.