President Obama has nominated Princeton University professor Alan Krueger as the new chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The hope is Krueger, who previously served in the Obama administration as a Treasury official, can help with the President's forthcoming jobs plan, scheduled to be unveiled in a speech on September 8.
Krueger is a labor economist, but "it's too late" for the government to spur job growth, Economic Cycle Research Institute co-founder Lakshman Achuthan tells The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task in the accompanying video. "There's nothing they're going to be able to do about that near-term direction in the unemployment rate, especially if we slip into a recession because every time you have a recession by definition the unemployment rate will be spiking."
Nearly four years after our last recession began unemployment is currently 9.2% and job growth remains slow at best.
As we noted in an earlier clip ECRI isn't ready to make a new recession call but Achuthan says the time to act was in the spring when the economic indicators started to weaken. "We were above 200,000 [monthly payrolls] and we're not going back there anytime soon," he says. "We're going to continue to weaken at least through the end of this year," which is (more) grim news for the millions of Americans in need of work.
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