When Americans vote in November unemployment will be below 6%
11 May 2020 Leave a comment
The majority of unemployment is recall and rest unemployment. But there is considerable search and mismatch unemployment in international travel and education.
Friday’s US labour market report rightly got a lot of media attention globally. The spike in US unemployment to 15% surely is historical and tells us quite a bit about just how big a shock has hit the US and the global economy.
However, where most commentators are wrong is assuming that this has to be seen as a normal recession. I on the other hand would argue that this has little to do with a normal recession. In fact I am increasingly thinking that the use of the term ‘recession’ is a misnomer in relation to this crisis.
Back in April I argued in my blog post ‘All set for a fast recovery after the ‘Great Lockdown’ argued that this crisis primarily should be seen as an unplanned and very unpleasant ‘vacation’.
The IMF has called it the ‘Great Lockdown’ and I find this term very telling. Economies around…
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The Government Response Stringency Index
09 May 2020 Leave a comment
Having mentioned yesterday the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Stringency Index, I was playing around with variants of this chart, tracing the responses of various governments through time.
On this variant I’ve included the Anglo countries and most of the countries of western Europe.
It is only one index, and only as good as the presumptions about what mattered of those who put it together, but it is now quite widely used and cited.
In detail of course it is hard to read, but my main interest was in New Zealand relative to where the generality of other western countries were, and you can read the New Zealand line: throughout the “Level 4 lockdown” the compilers of the index judged our restrictions to be the most stringent of any of the countries, although as at the last updates – and they aren’t updating every country every day – we had…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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