Keep the Expectations Low - While Expecting To Be Disappointed

Author's Note: Please take a few minutes and Join the Firedoglake Membership Program today. FDL provides the tools that help me and others extend our reach with our rants so we need to support FDL when we can.

So, here we are, waiting for President Obama to give his long awaited "Jobs" speech tonight. However, from the news reports and "analyses" in the TradMed speculating on the content and potential proposals I will not be holding my breath on there being much if anything worthwhile coming out of the speech. The cliche of "too little, too late" most comes to mind. While CNN had this report today on the stimulus from February 2009 having created jobs, it was nowhere near large enough. This article from Center for Economic and Policy Research from October '10, points out that there was a need for a stimulus nearly three times the size of the $787B from February '09.

We are and have been in an employment/jobs crisis for years now. Even while the official unemployment figure stays above 9%, even optimistic projections have unemployment to stay high through 2012, some projections have the high unemployment continuing as far out as 2020. Unfortunately, the current White House seems to be more willing to pretend to do something for show rather than actually doing something that will be effective.

As always, there are just some things that I do not understand. A large part of President's Obama's plan is further tax cuts (or rather, extending existing tax cuts such as the payroll tax cut). We have fairly strong evidence starting with the initial Bush tax cuts in 2001, that tax cuts have created few if any jobs over the past ten years yet we continue to be presented with tax cuts as a job creating panacea.

We also keep hearing about how businesses will create so many new jobs if they can only bring back the trillions in cash they have stashed overseas. Andrew Ross Sorkin of all people points out the fallacy of the tax holiday in this piece from the NY Times DealBook from this past Monday:

Cluelessness or Cognitive Dissonance?

My apologies for not writing any posts for a while but I do get tired of having to repeat myself so frequently.

Once again we see the cluelessness of the financial reporters in a couple of articles from the past few days. First up was an AP story (via MSNBC) which reported on an analysis from Fidelity Investments on people raiding their 401Ks due to "hardships." This came on top of the Weekly New Unemployment claims report showing (Reuters via CNBC):

New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed to a nine-month high last week, yet another setback to the frail economic recovery.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 12,000 to a seasonally adjusted 500,000 in the week ended August 14, the highest since mid-November, the Labor Department said on Thursday.

Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast claims slipping to 476,000 from the previously reported 484,000 the prior week, which was revised up to 488,000 in Thursday's report.

But today's (Sunday, August 22) NY Times really steps in it.

Renewed economic uncertainty is testing Americans’ generation-long love affair with the stock market.

Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.

If that pace continues, more money will be pulled out of these mutual funds in 2010 than in any year since the 1980s, with the exception of 2008, when the global financial crisis peaked.

Small investors are “losing their appetite for risk,” a Credit Suisse analyst, Doug Cliggott, said in a report to investors on Friday.