Will the official unemployment rate creep up to 8.3 percent? Or will it tick down a notch as more depressed workers exit the job market? Will June job adds top May’s paltry 69,000?
Political analysts who see President Obama’s re-election prospects inexorably tied to people’s perception of the economy are biting their nails this morning. And such numbers do matter to people in the financial world, since even a minor improvement in the economy, or another flagging of demand, can have a big impact on markets.
Yet I imagine few Americans feel as though anything new will come out of these numbers. They know that our economy is stuck in a rut and that things aren’t going to get better, unless something big changes.
For more than three years know, they have had “hope”—or at least that was the slogan—that the present course of massive government borrowing and management of the economy would yield a boom in job creation. You remember how ObamaCare’s passage was supposed to lead to huge job creation because it would (cough) bring health care premiums down and bring certainty to employers? Remember how the billions showered on “green energy” projects was to usher in a new, cleaner economy and multitude of jobs?
Well, not so much. And it seems highly doubtful that these numbers will break that trend of disappointment. Leave it to the spin masters to see if they can twist these new numbers into something resembling good news. Most Americans know that such good news will have to wait until real change happens.