Y ahora se enteran de esto?
Pues en 12 meses nos dirán que la destrucción de empleo se acabó, lo que me imagino es que será tarde para entrar en bolsa. En fin... que viene Octubre y luego elecciones :-D
NY TIMES 20th September 2010
The Recession Has (Officially) Ended
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
1:50 p.m. | Updated
The recession officially ended in June 2009, according to the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of such dates.
As many economists had expected, this official end date makes the most recent downturn the longest since World War II. This recent recession, having begun in December 2007, lasted 18 months. Until now the longest postwar recessions were those of 1973-5 and 1981-2, which each lasted 16 months.
The newly-declared end-date to the recession also confirms what many had suspected: The 2007-9 recession was the deepest on record since the Great Depression, at least in terms of job losses.
Recession and expansion dates are based on various economic indicators, including gross domestic product, income, employment, industrial production and wholesale-retail sales. The Business Cycle Dating Committee typically waits to declare that the economy has turned until well after the fact, when it has a longer track record of economic data to confirm a new trend.
The bureau took care to note that the recession, by definition, meant only the period until the economy reached its low point — not a return to its previous vigor.
“In determining that a trough occurred in June 2009, the committee did not conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned to operating at normal capacity,” the bureau said. “Rather, the committee determined only that the recession ended and a recovery began in that month.”
The committee had previously met in April to consider whether an end to the recession could be declared, but members decided that the data were still inconclusive. Since then, however, the Bureau of Economic Analysis has released revised numbers for output and income growth over the past year, and the addition of this new information helped push the committee toward declaring an official turning point.
“That gave us the definitive picture of what happened in 2009,” said Robert J. Gordon, a member of the committee for over 30 years and an economics professor at Northwestern. “At this point we’re not going to get any new information to consider until July 2011. So we knew that if we’re going to do anything, we should probably do something now.”
Professor Gordon also said that nearly every indicator that the committee looks at simultaneously reached its low point in June 2009, which made that month a relatively easy selection as the official turning point. The main exception to this trend was employment, which hit its trough six months later, in December 2009.
This lag has led many to refer to the current situation as a “jobless recovery,” and had even prompted suggestions that the weak job market should play a bigger role in determining recession start and end dates.
Professor Gordon notes, however, that the lag between a turnaround in gross domestic product and a turnaround in the job market was even worse after the 2001 recession.
“In that episode employment continued falling for 19 months after output troughed,” he said. “If anything the case for putting employment more prominently in the committee dating was weaker this time.”
Still, the magnitude of job losses was certainly worse in the 2007-9 recession, he said. From December 2007 to June 2009, the American economy shed more than 5 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs; through December 2009, the month that employment bottomed, the economy had shed more than 6 percent of these jobs.
In terms of unemployment, which is measured by a different government survey and considers only people who are actively looking for work, the rate most recently peaked last October at 10.1 percent. It had gotten higher in 1982, when it reached 10.8 percent. But the composition of the work force looked very different in the 1980s — it was younger, and younger people tend to have higher unemployment rates — and so if you adjust for age, unemployment this time around looks much worse.
Additionally, a broader measure of unemployment, which also includes people who are reluctantly working part time when they wish to be working full time and those who have given up on looking for work altogether, also shows that unemployment this time around was far worse than in any previous postwar recession.
Whether the decline in output represented a record loss, however, depends on what metric you use.
In terms of how much inflation-adjust output declined, this most recent recession had the most severe contraction since World War II, according to Robert E. Hall, a Stanford economics professor and committee chair. But some economists say that a better measure would be how far output falls relative to where the economy would have been if growing “normally.”
“It’s definitely not as deep as 1981-82 when measured relative to economy’s potential growth rate,” Professor Gordon said.
He said that he does not believe the economy is headed for a “double dip” recession — the committee itself does not engage in forecasting — because trends in income and jobs indicate that the economy is still slowly but surely trending upward.
But the anemic growth since the cycle trough in June 2009 is still extraordinarily worrying. The deeper recession of the 1980s was followed by a strong, robust bounce-back in growth; this current recovery is barely trudging along.
“What’s really unique about this recession is the amount of unemployment in combination with the slowness of the recovery,” he said. “That’s just not happened before. We had a sharp recession followed by a sharp recovery in the 1980s. And in ‘91 and ‘01 we had slow recoveries, but those recessions were shallow recessions so the slowness didn’t matter much.”
Professor Gordon estimates that economy needs a long-run output growth rate of 2.5 percent to keep the unemployment rate, now at 9.5 percent, even constant.
But with an annual growth rate of a measly 1.6 percent in the second quarter of this year, and private forecasts that the third quarter won’t be much better, unemployment may actually “inch up” in the months ahead, Professor Gordon says.
“That’s why the political news is so entirely dominated by the word ‘jobs,’” he said. “The amount of unemployment we’ve already got and the slowness of recovery lead to predictions that we could have 9-plus percent unemployment even through the next presidential election.”
