From Pwire:
| Andrew Sullivan: “One profound thing has happened this year. It has become clear that the 2007 recession was much, much more severe than we realized at the time; and that the employment recovery is likely to be stalled for as long as it takes for Americans to pay down more debt. This is not that surprising. We knew this was a bad one; and we also knew that recoveries after financial crashes tend to last longer. But politically, it has up-ended the core strategy of Obama’s re-election. The bet was that recovery would be visible enough by 2012 for voters to remember who got us into this mess and be patient with those trying to get us out of it.”“For the most part, it seems to me that the bet has failed.” |
A couple of comments to this comment:
1. Many predicted a decade of stagnation and depression right before and during the crash of ’08. Most were perhaps more surprised about how quickly stocks and profits rebounded, even though unemployment and inequality stayed just as bad.
2. There might have been a bet about a visible recovery by 2012 – but the assumption seems to have been that the economy would rebound by itself, if you only gave it some time. Not so. Also, the two driving forces in the job market of outsourcing and technology replacing workers made this a structural setback, not a cyclic one. Things have changed for good. And robots and outsourcing are just continuing – while profits soar. The bet should’ve rather been that things will only get worse in the coming years.
T.
