How the president might tout the economy
President Barack Obama is set to deliver remarks on the economy on Thursday at Northwestern University in Illinois. While unemployment has fallen to 6.1 percent, many people still feel uneasy about the recovery.
So we asked a couple of economic thinkers: What could the president say to tout the economy?
“In particular, you would want to point to the labor market,” says Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at BTIG. He says job gains have been steady for months.
“I think there’s this misconception that we need to see 300 or 400 or 500,000 jobs created every month,” he says. “In the context of where the economy currently is, the numbers we’re getting, which are around 200-and-change-thousand a month, are pretty good.”
Wells Fargo senior economist Mark Vitner says things don’t seem better because of the quality of jobs being added, many of them part-time or in low-wage professions. Take New York City, for example.
“There are more than a quarter million more jobs in New York City today than there were prior to the financial crisis,” Vitner says. “But the total amount of income earned from working in New York City is less today than it was prior to the financial crisis.”
Vitner says the lack of improvement in income growth is the driving factor behind the country’s economic worry.
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