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Giving up hope

By
John Crudele
Published Sep. 8, 2012, 4:00 a.m. ET

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Ugly!

That’s the only way you can describe the employment data released yesterday.

In August, there was a depressingly small 96,000 jobs created — when Wall Street and Main Street were expecting a lot more.

Like 30 percent more, or 125,000 jobs.

President Obama says he is not happy with this continuing slow-motion economic growth pattern. He should talk to those without a job.

In August, 368,000 out-of-work Americans, having run out of hope of landing a job, stopped looking. Most of those were between 16 and 24, according to the Labor Department. The percentage of people in that age group is the lowest since 1955.

They’ve dropped out of the labor force. They have lots of company — the US labor force in August shrank to 65.3 percent of working-age Americans, the lowest in 31 years.

So don’t be fooled by the drop in the jobless rate to 8.1 percent. If every unemployed American stopped looking for a job the unemployment rate would be zero — but we would still be in the same stinking malaise.

Remember, we need about 150,000 new jobs a month just to absorb new college grads and others who are trying to first enter the workforce.

With yesterday’s numbers, the US is still 6 million jobs short of the peak at the end of November 2007. And there are 2.75 million fewer jobs now than when President Obama took office.

People who are out of work — and there are about 25 million who are either unemployed, under-employed or too discouraged to look for work — don’t stand a chance with job growth this weak.

So who is to blame?

That, of course, is what Mitt Romney and President Obama will be arguing about the next two months. Most of the job losses did come under President George Bush, as former President Clinton correctly pointed out the other night.

But the job gains during President Obama’s nearly four years in office haven’t been very impressive.

The odd thing about yesterday’s figure is that Wall Street wasn’t thrilled with it.

The talk all week was that a poor jobs report — and this one was a real stinker — would force the Federal Reserve to kick-start a third round of Quantitative Easing.

QE, cooked up in the crazy Princeton lab of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, is the policy by which the Central Bank prints reams of money without regard for inflation or the devaluation of the currency. It then uses this dough to buy government bonds.

Since the Fed has unlimited buying power if it keeps the printing presses rolling, demand for government bonds will always be strong and interest rates will remain low.

The only problem is, QE hasn’t done a thing to help the US economy. But it has twice helped stock prices rise temporarily — which is why Wall Street was thought to be in love with QE3.

So what happened yesterday when stocks yawned at the bad economic news and the increasing chatter that the Fed’s QE3 was coming?

Wall Street may have exhausted itself the previous day when stock indices reached multi-year highs in reaction to a version of QE announced by the European Central Bank. Or, more ominously, Wall Street might be tiring of the old QE trick.

Whatever the case, this much is clear: anyone who doubted that jobs would be issues No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 in this election probably has now changed their mind.