Word: marketably
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Wait a second. Will the stock market go up or down? That major discrepancy raises an important point. Making predictions a year out is a tricky - and unreliable - business...
...other end of the spectrum are the likes of David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff. He holds that this year's stock-market uptick can be almost entirely credited to government intervention and stimulus, and that the true, underlying trend of tighter credit and reduced spending will re-assert itself and be with us for years to come. "We have said repeatedly that this recession is really a depression," Rosenberg recently wrote...
...much for that fall in unemployment, huh? It was a telling reaction, indicative of the still gloomy national mood, the perceived fickleness of monthly economic indicators - and the diminished status of the unemployment rate as a statistic. Once the indispensable, largely unquestioned measure of the state of the job market, it is now treated with suspicion and disdain. With good reason, because the unemployment rate fails to accurately reflect just how bad things are out there. (See 10 perfect jobs for the recession - and after...
Such measures still rely on people's own assessment of whether they want to work. A BLS study a decade ago found that these self-assessments aren't all that reliable. So how about the simplest possible job-market measure, the employment-to-population ratio? Among Americans ages 25 to 54, it was at 75.1% in November, down from 80.3% in early 2007 and - with the exception of October's 75% - the lowest it's been since 1984. Because of the entry of women into the workforce, the ratio trended upward from the 1960s through the 1990s. If you look...
There are certainly other factors at play here besides just a tough job market - more stay-at-home dads, more rich loafers, more prison inmates. But it also may be a sign that these are in fact the worst times for American workers since the 1930s. Which helps explain why there was so little excitement about that drop in the unemployment rate...