and now for your moment of Oy.....Fed Data Cruncher Finds No New Normal Unemployment

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-10/fed-data-cruncher-finds-no-new-normal-unemployment-with-nationwide-figures.html

Mary Daly holds up two charts containing 33 bars that all point down. They show eight industries getting hit equally hard after the 18-month recession ended in June 2009, suggesting that much of the past two years’ high unemployment is broad-based and should dissipate as the economy improves.

Daly is among researchers throughout the Federal Reserve system -- from San Francisco to Philadelphia and the board in Washington -- who are scouring data, examining models and gleaning anecdotes to determine why the jobless rate has remained stuck around 9 percent or more since April 2009. Most are reaching the conclusion that any long-term, structural shifts in the labor market aren’t significant enough to keep the U.S. from returning to a pre-crisis unemployment level of 5 percent to 6 percent by about 2016.

“If we were mis-measuring the natural rate of unemployment, I would expect to see rapid wage growth in some sectors offset by wage declines in others,” said Daly, 48, who heads the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s applied microeconomic research department. “I don’t see that. I see pretty uniform patterns across all sectors.”

This means Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues should be able to bring down unemployment by continuing to keep interest rates near zero, eventually stimulating demand and encouraging businesses to start hiring again, said Sung Won Sohn, former chief economist at Wells Fargo & Co. and now an economics professor at California State University-Channel Islands. The risk is they will leave record stimulus in place too long, sparking a rising price spiral.

[PoliticAverse]

1. These people might want to google "Japan's Lost Decade". n/t

[xchrom]

2. indeed.

and i think there was at LEAST one article posted talking about an american lost decade -- which we are still in.

[dbonds]

3. Want to fix unemployment? Tax companies that off shore jobs.

[xchrom]

4. tax 'em hard. nt