"The Obama Bounce"

The Obama Bounce

by Paul Krugman at the NY Times

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/the-obama-bounce/?_r=0

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Since Obama took office, we’ve gained 6.7 million private-sector jobs, compared with just 3.1 million at the same point under Bush. But under Bush we’d added 1.2 million public sector jobs, while under Obama we’ve cut 600,000. The point is that relatively good private sector performance has been masked by public-sector cutbacks; this is the opposite of what you usually hear, but that’s no surprise.

What about the prospects looking forward? As I’ve pointed out before, business investment has been relatively strong throughout. Residential investment, however, has been very low since 2006, suggesting that there’s a backlog of pent-up demand, which should come into play in an improving job market. So that’s one source of strength. Also, low oil prices are going to be mostly positive, although with some adverse regional effects; more on that in a later post.

Overall, then, the next year and probably the next two years are likely to be pretty good. This doesn’t mean that the overall track record of policy has been good — we’ve wasted trillions in foregone output, damaged the lives of millions if not tens of millions. But it will feel a lot better than the years before.




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