The title is fairly revealing.
U.S. unemployment has now surged above the arbitrary ceiling of 10%. Double digit unemployment has been atypical in the U.S. since I’ve been alive (which is an incredibly long time :)). But even though 10% is basically an arbitrary value and there doesn’t appear to exist some law of nature that indicates this is particularly meaningful, that doesn’t have to be true for this numerical fact to have an impact. After all by some trick of the mind due to convention or predisposition people seem to perceive 10% unemployment as an indicator of serious problems. Thus there is now apparently "political pressure on the Obama administration" to wave some magic wand.
Rather than point out that there is nothing inherently meaningful in a 10% unemployment rate (though this has been unusual for the past 25 years) Obama said that the figure is "a sobering number that underscores the economic challenge ahead". Obama signed into law more fiscal stimulus measures on Friday. And that’s basically all he can do in the short-run; he’s president, not emperor.
Like the Democrats, the Republicans are of course trying to extract some political advantage from this, suggesting that the proposed health care reform is "job-killing." Politics seems to be a good occupation for childish people who can consistently at least appear to see what they want to see in any situation. It seems to me that a "robust" public option is a necessary condition for saving America's manufacturing base.
Yet capital markets haven’t reacted strongly to the jobs report, and the jobs report is normally an economic data set with high market impact. This induces me to ponder: are stocks and bonds becoming less sensitive to the employment outlook? There are some intuitively appealing reasons to think this may be the case. As a society’s enterprises become more capital-centric and require highly-specialized and –skilled labor in relatively small quantities, it may be true that there exists less plasticity of both GDP and expected GDP with respect to quantity of employment. This is bad for rank-and-file citizens but good for an elite class of capital owners. Some economists have suggested that since there is likely to be some non-trivial increases in long-term unemployment "a rise in structural unemployment of the kind that occurred in Europe in the early 1980s" could occur because laborers job skill levels will erode. I am by no means intending to suggest that these phenomena are clearly related.
All quotes are from: http://www.ft.com/...
*I humbly suggest reading FT and not the Murdoch Street Rag.