Thursday, August 11, 2011

Why We Are Still In Recession

Who cares about double-dip. We never left. Why? because you can't get out of a recession without consumers/labor income growth. While productivity has grown over the last few years, labor's share of national income continues to plummet. This implies that others (capitalists / profit-makers) are 'out of their recession' but consumers and laborers are not.

The BLS has a nice publication here.

Ordinarily a low cyclical labor share isn't necessarily a problem because firms can use profits to invest in new business ventures and eventually lower the unemployment rate and provide more compensation in a recovery. The problem here of course is that firms are too busy paying off past debts from poor decisions made a decade ago, or too skittish to do anything substantial with their profits at the moment. So that, in combination with the low labor share of income is like a double-whammy for consumers and laborers who see the haves continue to have and the have-nots continuing to have nothing.



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