When employment hit an air pocket in December, most analysts brushed off the dreadful jobs number as an anomaly, or a function of the weather. They chose to believe Ben Bernanke rather than their lying eyes. ItÂ’s hard to ignore a second signal that the U.S. economy is dead in the water, though: on Monday the Institute for Supply Management reported the steepest drop in manufacturing orders since December 1980.
...Business won’t invest in brick, mortar, equipment and labor. Part of this is due to the Obama adminstration’s regulatory reign of terror. Part of this is due to Obamacare, which adds to business costs. Part of this is due to secular trends–what Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps calls a “structural slump.” We no longer have high-tech companies: we have instead aging monopolies run by patent lawyers. |