Wall Street Just Doesn't Give Up--While 25 MILLION Have No Work

It seems increasingly unlikely that the United States will prove his point. The government is expected to report Friday that the economy expanded at a rate below 2 percent in the first half of the year — well below the nation’s long-term average and too slowly to recover the losses sustained during the recession.

Twenty-five million Americans still could not find full-time jobs last month. And hopes for the second half of the year are under the cloud of a political crisis that has cast doubt on the government’s willingness to pay its bills.

Roughly four years since the start of the financial crisis, and two years since the official end of the resulting recession, what has taken hold in their wake is a new kind of great moderation — an era of slow growth.

The widely quoted unemployment rate of 9.2 percent is also one of the narrowest measures of the problem. The share of people who cannot find full-time work is almost twice as high. Job growth in May and June was basically flat, although there are some signs of increased hiring in July.

.....

“We did a pretty good job of fixing bank balance sheets, but I think that household balance sheets are the ones that have suffered the most,” said Mark Thoma, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon. “We could have done much more to help households.”