Snow? Oh, No. It’s Still the Economy

by Tula Connell, Feb 9, 2010

Here are a few tidbits worth noting from around the nation’s economic scene.

Bob Herbert at the New York Times puts the sorry U.S. unemployment rate in clearer–and more painful–perspective today, pointing out how the workers losing jobs are those who had almost no income to begin with.

The highest group, with household incomes of $150,000 or more, had an unemployment rate during that quarter of 3.2 percent. The next highest, with incomes of $100,000 to 149,999, had an unemployment rate of 4 percent.

Contrast those figures with the unemployment rate of the lowest group, which had annual household incomes of $12,499 or less. The unemployment rate of that group during the fourth quarter of last year was a staggering 30.8 percent. That’s more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression.

But Wall Street CEOs are raking it in, with Goldman Sachs getting praised for a giving its CEO a bonus only totally $9 million in deferred stock options. Such modesty isn’t quite enough, writes Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren.  Rather, bankers “squandered what little trust was left” when they took taxpayer bailouts, Warren writes today in the Wall Street Journal. Warren recommends bankers can reclaim that trust by supporting a strong consumer protection agency that would root out the kinds of abuses that helped lead to the financial crisis. The question, of course is, what’s their incentive to do so?

Over at the University of Maryland, Prof. Peter Morici describes the U.S. economy as in a shambles, attributing the unbalanced U.S. trade relationship with China as a major factor behind the mess (h/t to Alliance for American Manufacturing). Meanwhile, White House economist Jared Bernstein writes at Huffington Post that the Recovery Act has

helped move us from a situation where we were losing a nightmarish 750,000 jobs per month to one in which we’ve pulled back from the economic abyss and are moving a lot closer to adding jobs, on net, on a regular basis.

They’re both right.

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