Weekend Economists Waiting for Godot March 7-9, 2014

[xchrom]

63. We Can't Escape Our 'Groundhog Day' Recovery

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/we-cant-escape-our-groundhog-day-recovery/284301/

I'm never going to forgive Punxsutawney Phil for the last six weeks of wintry weather, but the economy will.

The past five years have been a Groundhog Day recovery. Every day, we wake up hoping that this will be the day that the economy finally picks up. And every day, we wake up to hear Sonny and Cher playing find out that it hasn't. Jobs growth just keeps chugging along at 2 percent pretty much no matter what.



Except when it's cold outside—maybe. Job growth stalled below even this good-but-not-good-enough level in December and January when we were finding out what a burst of arctic air feels like. Instead of the 180,000 jobs a month we've gotten used to during the recovery, we got an average of 94,000. It was even more jarring, because it had, once again, looked like the economy was maybe, possibly speeding up right before the polar vortexes hit.

So the question is whether this slower growth was just the unseasonably cold winter hurting the economy for now or something bigger hurting it for longer.

Well, the February jobs report tells us that the slowdown probably happened because the weather outside was frightful. The economy added 175,000 jobs in February, and 25,000 more than we originally thought in December and January. Unemployment did edge up to 6.7 percent, but that was partly for the good reason that more people were looking for jobs, and weren't giving up. Now, people didn't shop or go out quite as much because of the cold, but that will change when the weather does. And it's already starting to. In other words, the economy is pretty much the same now as it's been ever since the recovery began.