One Good Jobs Report Isn't Enough

The March employment report may end up showing a gain in payrolls, but the U.S. needs to do much more to foster private-sector job growth.
By Peter Morici ,

The Labor Department plans to release March employment data Friday, and economists have been voicing optimism that the economy is at last gaining jobs and that the recession has ended.

The consensus forecast, based on surveys of economists taken at the end of last week, is for a 200,000 increase in jobs in March after the economy shed 36,000 jobs in February. The unemployment rate is expected to remain steady at 9.7%.

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estimate for private-sector jobs creation, released Wednesday, indicated a 23,000 decline in payrolls, but that estimate does not include government workers and does not always track more comprehensive Labor Department estimates of private employment.

Government employment -- boosted by temporary census jobs -- should play a big role, but most private economists have been looking for private employment to begin growing again.

Either way, the pace of private job creation won't be enough to restore the economy to good health quickly.

The Great Recession destroyed 8.4 million jobs. To bring down the unemployment rate, the economy must add about 150,000 jobs a month to accommodate the growth of the adult population and the re-entry of discouraged workers and marginally occupied self-employed workers. Including the latter two groups, unemployment is closer to 20% than the 9.7% headline figure.

Overall, the economy must add more than 13 million jobs to bring unemployment down to 6% by the end of 2013. With state and local governments facing tough financial constraints, the private sector must add at least that many jobs to accomplish the task.

Accounting for productivity, population growth and labor force re-entry, the economy and the private business sector must grow at better than 3% a year to bring unemployment down, and that is a tough challenge.

GDP growth in the fourth quarter was 5.6%, but a slower pace of inventory depletion accounted for 3.8 percentage points. Private demand -- private consumption, investment and net exports -- only added about 2.1 percentage points. Government spending, even with stimulus disbursements, subtracted 0.3 percentage points from growth.

Businesses need customers and capital to invest in new facilities and create jobs.Slow-growing private demand -- at only about 2% -- is the big problem.

Consumers are spending again but at a more moderate pace and are not likely to return to their freewheeling borrowing of years past. Auto sales are recovering but will not reach prerecession levels for many years.

The construction sector is suffering from an overhang of too many homes, stores and offices built on cheap credit and speculation during the boom. Many structures sit on overvalued land, and inevitable and necessary adjustments in real estate values are slowed by Obama administration efforts to provide mortgage relief and prop up housing values.

The trade deficit -- in particular, huge imports of oil and the imbalance with China -- cuts a huge hole in demand for U.S. goods and services. Without addressing trade deficits on oil and with China, creating enough new jobs will be a daunting, likely impossible, task.

Detroit has the technology to produce much more efficient gasoline-powered vehicles now, and the U.S. has much undeveloped oil and natural gas -- both onshore in the lower 48 states and offshore in Alaska. A shift in national policy to much more rapidly build fuel-efficient vehicles and tap domestic energy would push out imported oil and create many new jobs.

China maintains an undervalued currency that makes its products artificially cheap and deceptively competitive on U.S. store shelves, and it practices virulent protectionism against U.S. exports.

President Obama promised to address currency manipulation during his campaign for the White House but has done little substantive since. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner during his confirmation hearings acknowledged the problem but since then has demonstrated little grasp of the nature or scope of the problem.

The Treasury Department will soon issue its semiannual report on foreign government currency management practices. As stated policy, Beijing intervenes in currency markets to boost exports, fire industrial development and selfishly transfer manufacturing to China, creating unemployment in North America and Europe. A reenactment of Smoot-Hawley, China's mercantilism transfers the hangover from the Great Recession to western nations.

It is high time for President Obama and Secretary Geithner to quit the hand-wringing, name China a currency manipulator and implement specific, comprehensive macroeconomic policies to counter China's cynical abuse of free trade.

Regarding capital to finance business expansion, regional banks, which serve small and medium-sized businesses, remain burdened by failing commercial real estate loans and mortgage-backed securities. The TARP was intended to remove many of those from their books but has often been abused. A government-owned company, like the Resolution Trust Corp. used to address Savings and Loan Crisis, could relieve them of troubled loans, earn a profit for the government and give small and medium-sized businesses adequate bank credit again.

Professor Peter Morici, of the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, is a recognized expert on economic policy and international economics. Prior to joining the university, he served as director of the Office of Economics at the U.S. International Trade Commission. He is the author of 18 books and monographs and has published widely in leading public policy and business journals, including the Harvard Business Review and Foreign Policy. Morici has lectured and offered executive programs at more than 100 institutions, including Columbia University, the Harvard Business School and Oxford University. His views are frequently featured on CNN, CBS, BBC, FOX, ABC, CNBC, NPR, NPB and national broadcast networks around the world.

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