"The anti-business president’s pro-business recovery"

[impik]

Ezra Klein:

This White House has “vilified industries,” complains the Chamber of Commerce. America is burdened with “an anti-business president,” moans The Weekly Standard.

Would that all presidents were this anti-business: according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, corporate profits hit $1.37 trillion in the first quarter—an all-time high. Businesses are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash reserves. Business spending jumped 20 percent last quarter, and is up by 13 percent against 2009. The Obama administration has dropped taxes for small businesses and big ones alike. Maybe the president could be anti-me for a while. I could use the money.

The reality is that America’s supposedly anti-business president has led an extremely pro-business recovery. The corporate community has recovered first, and best. The populist tone that conservative magazines and business groups decry is partly in reaction to this: as corporate America’s position is getting better and better, the recovery is looking shakier and shakier. Unemployment is high. Housing looks perilously close to a double dip. Job growth is weak. And corporate America, for all its profits, isn’t hiring. The 71,000 jobs the private sector added in July aren’t sufficient to keep up with population growth, much less cut into the ranks of the unemployed.

Pundits have expended a lot of energy on this puzzle, but there’s actually no puzzle at all. A look at the history of financial crises shows that our slow, halting recovery is right on schedule, and the business community’s caution is predictable.

In their book, This Time Is Different, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff look at every financial crisis over the last 800 years. It’s an exhaustive study, and its conclusions are depressing for a country that believes itself exceptional even in its suffering: we’re not special.

If you look at unemployment, housing prices, government debt, and the stock market, Rogoff says, “the U.S. is just driving down the tracks of a typical post–WWII deep financial crisis.” In some areas, we’re even a bit ahead of the game: economic output usually drops by 9 percent. We held the drop to 4 percent.

Even the unevenness of our recovery is predictable. “Housing and employment come back much slower than equity and ,” Reinhart says. GDP usually falls for two years and then recovers. Equity can move even faster, which helps explain corporate America’s rapid recovery. But employment tends to fall for five years, and sometimes it never quite recovers. And housing? That’s usually a six-year slide.


Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/07/slow-to-spend.html?from=rss

[depakid]

1. One would have thought corporate right pandering

would win at least some fleeting admiration from the panderees.

But of course, that's not how it works in real life, which make the panderer out to be little more than a fool.

[katandmoon]

2. But it works so well with Republicans!!!!

[dkf]

3. All that to tell us there's nothing to be done but wait?

Rather anti climactic.