EconomicCrisis.US

Central bank chief Ben Bernanke once criticized Japan for dithering with its economic crisis. Now he tells the world he needs time to think.

U.S. employment data due on Friday could make the clock tick very loudly for the Federal Reserve chairman.

Bernanke disappointed some financial market participants last week when he declined to give details on how the Fed could lift a U.S. economy moving ahead at stall speed.

Most economists expected his widely anticipated speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, would at least give a tour of his monetary toolkit.
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US President Barack Obama nominated Alan Krueger, a Princeton University expert on unemployment, as his top economic adviser as he plots an “urgent” new offensive on the jobs crisis.

Obama described Krueger as one of America’s top economists who understood the challenges that country faces, with a recovery that has been too tepid to to make significant cuts in an unemployment rate of 9.1 per cent.

Krueger, if confirmed by the Senate, will serve as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and succeed long-time Obama confidante Austan Goolsbee who left the administration to return to academia in Chicago.
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Let’s call a spade a spade.

In the aftermath of our economic crisis, the U.S. government and Federal Reserve pulled out all the stops.

God bless our politicians and our government. Not knowing what to do, most having never been in the situation before, once the U.S. economy collapsed in 2008 our government threw all kinds of money at the economy. They bailed out companies, they bailed out Wall Street, they saved the banks, and they tried desperately to create jobs.

Sure, some will say the government went too far and saved the wrong people, but we are not talking about a bunch of people with economics degrees and years of experience running businesses. They did the best they could. At least they did something.
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Panic is back in the financial markets. In the United States, the long-awaited recovery is still missing and the latest economic data are very worrying.

In the labor market, unemployment is still above the ceiling of 9% of the workforce. Last week, the stock market, including the Dow Jones, went through a sharp decline following the publication of statistics on industrial activity in the country.

Major banks have already revised their growth estimates downward. For the fourth quarter of 2011, JP Morgan is now evaluating the growth of US GDP at 1%, versus 2.5% previously. Worse still, in the first quarter of 2012, GDP should grow by only 0.5% according to their estimates.
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