Ancora sulla disoccupazione americana. L'India attraversa indenne la correzione dei mercati.

Dalle colonne del New York Times si leva un accorato appello affinchè il governo sostenga l'economia dopo i pessimi dati sull'occupazione di venerdì scorso (qui trovate l'analisi del mercato del lavoro pubblicata dal NYTimes). Scrive il NYTimes:

If the economy were a coal mine, the job market would be an 800-pound canary, warning of a recovery that is running out of oxygen.(...)
And the despair is not confined to the labor force. An array of recent indicators shows that there is no way to turn a nascent recovery into a self-sustaining expansion without plentiful good jobs. Stocks fell every day last week, as investors anticipated and then confronted the worse-than-expected jobs report. In May, factory orders for manufactured goods hit their lowest point in over a year. Home sales in May were abysmal, and retail sales fell for the first time since last fall; auto sales in June declined. Perhaps most ominous, budget cuts at the state and local level are expected to result in mass layoffs in the next year or so; in June, state and local governments cut 10,000 jobs. For all that, the biggest obstacle to recovery is not economic, it is political. The economy is limping badly as the federal stimulus and other government support are removed, obviously before the private sector is able to take up the slack. But Congress has failed to provide even the most basic support — extended unemployment benefits and bolstered aid to states.
Instead, Republicans and several Democrats have made the argument that cutting the deficit is more important than spurring the economy. The argument is wrong — jobs and the resulting tax revenue are crucial to repairing the budget. But the Democratic leadership in Congress and the White House has been incapable or unwilling to successfully rebut the deficit-mongers.
The economy has come a long way since the darkest days of the financial crisis, nearly two years ago, but it is still weak. The question now is whether it will move backward or forward.


Alcuni commentatori hanno cercato di sdrammatizzare la situazione enfatizzando come la velocità di diminuzione degli occupati stia rallentando, e confondendo un po' le carte in tavola. Le mette nuovamente in ordine Brad De Long in un post intitolato Jobs: Getting Worse More Slowly Isn't the Same as Getting Better. Il commento finale sull'uso della derivata seconda renderà felici sia i lettori economisti che quelli matematici: I remember being very proud of my seventeen-year-old last January when she was looking over my shoulder at some Obama Administration economic charts and said they appeared to "place excessive reliance on the second derivative." Seventeen is no longer a babe, but still: out of the mouths...

Se le considerazioni sull'occupazione U.S.A. (ma non mi pare che l'Europa goda di migliore salute) vi buttano giù potete trovare qualche raggio di luce nella prolungata fase di crescita delle economie latinoamericane, che stanno per una volta ottenendo risultati di gran lunga superiori di quelli delle rispettive squadre di calcio nazionali...Se poi cercate un mercato azionario che non sia stato travolto dal pessimismo dell'ultimo trimestre, allora vi conviene indirizzarvi verso l'Asia:
l'India infatti batte la Cina e gli Stati Uniti con ampio margine.