Global Economic Crisis

The U.S. Labor Department has released its most recent official inflation report, which shows that the annual rate has now reached 6.2 %. This is the highest level of inflation in the United States in thirty years. It should be noted that official statistics on American inflation  are usually a lagging indicator. Likely, annual inflation in the U.S. is in the 8-9 percent range.

As noted on this blog previously, there are a number of converging forces feeding this inflationary spiral, which is afflicting not only the U.S. but the entire global economy. These include Covid restrictions that have reduced employment in key sectors, everything from shipping capacity to energy production and computer chip manufacturing. Then there has been the unprecedented flood of liquidity released by many central banks, in particular the Federal Reserve, which in this mix of lower productivity serves as a turbocharger of inflationary forces.

The policy of the Fed, up to the present moment, has been to claim that this inflationary spiral is merely “transitory.” No one believes this anymore; it is absurd to believe that the policymakers in the Federal Reserve believe their own lies.

Why is the Fed engaging in deliberate deception, while inflation is likely to hit double digits? It would appear that the Fed has concluded that the American economy is in such dire straits, it requires the life support of money printing (quantitative easing and monetization of public debt). Furthermore, the level of public debt is reaching the point of unsustainability, leaving  only two outcomes: the U.S Treasury defaults on the national debt or the real value of the debt is sharply diminished by high inflation. Of course , the Fed will never publically admit that it prefers inflation, even at a high level, than the alternative. This would involve sharply raising interest rates, leading to a sharp recession.

The danger of the Federal Reserve’s policy of deception and stealthily preferring high inflation is that it will lead to unforeseen consequences. Sustained economic growth along with political stability is incompatible with high inflation. Ultimately, the Fed policy will lead to stagflation, and eventually the Federal Reserve will be left with no alternative but to sharply raise interest rates, however in a more consequential manner.

Sheldon Filger-blogger for GlobalEconomicCrisis.com

The just-released U.S. Labor Department report shows an addition 3.17 million American workers filed jobless claims in just the past week. This means that in a period of only seven weeks the U.S. shed 33.5 million jobs due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The employment picture in the United States is utterly dismal, with no end in sight to the contraction of employment numbers. Though there is wishful thinking on “reopening” the American economy, the reality on the ground shows freefall economic collapse engendered by a health crisis, with no short-term-term solution in sight, except continuation of the slowdown of economic activity.

The news from Europe is equally dire. The Bank of England is forecasting that the UK economy will contract in 2020 due to shutting down economic activity in response to  the coronavirus by  14 percent. According to the Bank of England, this is the nation’s worst economic contraction in three hundred years. In the Eurozone officials forecast a rate of quarterly economic contraction of 7.5 percent.

A global recession  is already underway, at an intensity far beyond that of the 2007-09 Global Financial Crisis. The current Global Economic Crisis created by Covid-19 suggests that a severe global depression is an increasingly likely prospect for the world.

The U.S. Labor Department just released its weekly number of jobless claims, and in a mocking twist of painful irony, the figures were an exact match for the previous week: 6.6. million additional jobless applications. This means that over the past three weeks, 16 million Americans have filed unemployment claims, adding another 10 percent to the unemployment rate in the United States, which now stands at just under 14%.

Never in history, not even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, has there been such a rapid rise in unemployment. The collapse of the job market in the U.S. has been replicated in virtually every advanced economy. This means that the health crisis created by policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic has now unleashed a destructive global economic crisis of unparalleled dimensions. And this is only the beginning. In the weeks ahead, the economic news will only get worse.

Such a swift collapse in employment numbers mean two simultaneous tsunamis of economic doom have been unleashed: an unprecedented rate of demand destruction, combined with an implosion in governmental revenues across the globe. The latter trend, at a time of increasingly vast deficit spending by sovereigns, will in due course unleash another wave of economic calamity; a sovereign debt crisis.

Never before in human history has a public health crisis created in its wake such economic calamity, resulting in the Global Economic Crisis of 2020.

The U.S. Labor Department released this morning its weekly report on jobless claims. The data shows last week’s record-setting 3.3 million claims has doubled this week to more than 6.6. million. This number exceeds not only the global financial crisis of 2007-09, but even the Great Depression of the 1930s, in the rapidity of job destruction.

The coronavirus pandemic has now unleashed a severe global economic crisis of catastrophic proportions. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. With a vaccine at least a year, and more likely 18 months , away from development and production, the entire planet is the grips of not only a massive health crisis, but a virtual meltdown of economic activity.

As the pace of jobs destruction accelerates, demand is also being annihilated, compounding the depth and pace of economic contraction. Undoubtedly, this will also generate a severe financial shock globally, as equities collapse, bond spreads widen and sovereign and corporate debt insolvency rampages with destructive ferocity.

The U.S. Labor Department released its worst weekly jobs report, demonstrating that the Covid-19 pandemic has unleashed a full-fledged global economic crisis more severe than the financial crisis of 2007-09, and increasingly likely to exceed the Great Depression of the 1930s in its impact.

Since the Labor Department began issuing its weekly jobless claims report in 1967, the previous record for unemployment filings was 695,000 in 1982. The expectation was that the report released today would be very bad, most estimates being in the range of one million. The actual number: 3.3 million. This is worse than devastating; it is a clear sign that we are beyond a severe global recession, and are almost certainly heading into a global economic depression.

As this is only the initial phase of the impact of the coronavirus induced unemployment, the figures just released by the Labor Department suggests the unemployment rate will likely exceed 20 %, possibly even 30 percent. It is not just the U.S. shedding jobs at an unprecedented rate; the entire global economy is being struck by a tsunami of jobs destruction. This economic catastrophe will inevitably lead to a level of severe social and political strife not experienced globally since the 1930s.

The U.S. Labor  Department has issued its employment data for May, and it is an unmitigated disaster. A mere 38,000 new jobs — many of them part-time — were created, while the supposedly stellar jobs numbers for previous months were revised downwards.  This is an appallingly bad employment report, yet the same Labor Department claims that the unemployment rate in the United States actually declined to  4.7 percent

It should be recalled that to keep pace with population growth, the American economy must add at least a quarter of a million new jobs each month.  If the result of a dismal 38,000 jobs in May is a supposed decline in the unemployment rate in the U.S., the only explanation is that many discouraged job seekers have supposedly “left” the work force, meaning that they are no longer considered by the Labor Department to be unemployed.

The jobs report for May, a disaster by any definition, explains the official and unofficial realities of the U.S. economy in 2016. The Obama administration maintains that the employment situation in the country is excellent; the data , devoid of spin, displays the exact opposite.

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According to the latest data from the U.S. Labor Department, initial unemployment benefit claims reached 479,000 in the last week of July. This reflects an unanticipated increase of 4.1 %, the highest level of initial jobless claims since last April.

The latest jobless claims report from the world’s largest economy make clear that the global economic crisis not only remains a potent reality; the jobs crisis now afflicting most advanced economies make a consumer-led economic recovery impossible. With governments across the globe beginning to transition from deficit-funded stimulus programs to austerity, it is equally clear that sovereigns overloaded with public debt will not be able to compensate for the fall-off in private sector demand much longer.

The latest data on U.S. jobless claims is just another indicator that a double-dip recession is becoming inevitable.

What began initially as the Global Financial Crisis has now become the Global Economic Crisis. The global demand destruction that is raging is now leading to a massive jobs crisis that will ravage the societies of virtually every nation on the planet. Governments throughout the world will attempt to address the jobs crisis in the same manner they have been responding to the financial and economic crisis: they will beg, borrow and print money measured in the trillions of dollars to throw at the problem. Their results in combating monstrous levels of unemployment will likely be as ineffectual as our political masters and their “experts” have been in attempting to ameliorate every other aspect of the Global Economic Crisis.

Later this week, updated unemployment statistics for the United States will be released. President-elect Barack Obama has already warned that they will be “sobering,” which likely means he already knows how bad they are. However, the U.S. government deliberately understates the true unemployment rate when they release official numbers. Among the statistical gymnastics utilized by the U.S. Labor Department is the expediency of excluding discouraged jobless who have given up hope of finding employment; they simply do not exist when the U.S. government counts its number of unemployed workers. When this component of the unemployed is counted, the true jobless rate in the United States is in excess of 12%, about half the peak rate experienced during the Great Depression. No wonder Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has now joined the list of those proclaiming that the U.S. is now in an economic depression.

The consumer demand of the U.S., driven by debt, is now collapsing with the growing jobs crisis. This is leading to demand destruction for those export goods developing economies around the world depend on to employ their teeming masses. During the course of the year the jobs crisis will clearly be a global phenomena, as are all the other factors that characterize the ongoing Global Economic Crisis. While the ultimate result is unclear, history tells us that massive unemployment on a global scale rips asunder social cohesion, facilitates political extremism and despotism, and exacerbates international tensions. The jobs crisis may ultimately contribute to a geopolitical crisis that threatens the very peace of our planet.