Friday, December 12, 2003

The BUSH BOOM!'s GDP spike gets front-page treatment. This, by contrast, gets buried on the back page of the business section:

According to the minutes [of an October 28 meeting] released on Thursday, members of the Fed's policy-making committee were convinced in late October that inflation would remain quite low "for the next year or two" and that the "slack" in both the job market and in factory use would not disappear until "the latter part of 2005 of even later."...

According to the October minutes, members of the policy-making committee argued that the rapid rise in productivity over the last year would curb job creation....

The projected 4 percent economic growth for 2004 might not be enough to ignite inflationary pressures, because productivity has been climbing at more than 5 percent a year. If productivity continues to climb at that pace, the economy could expand by 4 percent and still not have a meaningful drop in unemployment.


--New York Times

So there's no boom yet for unemployed, and it looks as if there won't be one for a good long time. And it's not Paul Krugman who's saying this -- it's Alan Greenspan's Fed. Shouldn't this be bigger news?

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