Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Top Obama Economist Warns Democrats: "We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country."

Jason Furman
 Jason Furman, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers  in the Obama administration and now a professor at Harvard is warning Democrats that "We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country."

During one Zoom presentation,“Everyone looked puzzled and thought I had misspoken,” Furman said in a Politico interview. Instead of forecasting a prolonged Depression-level economic catastrophe, Furman laid out a detailed case for why the months preceding the November election could offer Trump the chance to brag — truthfully — about the most explosive monthly employment numbers and gross domestic product growth ever.

And Furman has this right. It is a point I have been making, especially in the EPJ Daily Alert, since the start of the lockdowns, that the current economic downturn is different from a business cycle downturn.

Politico explains:
Furman’s case begins with the premise that the 2020 pandemic-triggered economic collapse is categorically different than the Great Depression or the Great Recession, which both had slow, grinding recoveries.

Instead, he believes, the way to think about the current economic drop-off, at least in the first two phases, is more like what happens to a thriving economy during and after a natural disaster: a quick and steep decline in economic activity followed by a quick and steep rebound.

The Covid-19 recession started with a sudden shuttering of many businesses, a nationwide decline in consumption and massive increase in unemployment. But starting around April 15, when economic reopening started to spread but the overall numbers still looked grim, Furman noticed some data that pointed to the kind of recovery that economists often see after a hurricane or industrywide catastrophe like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Consumption and hiring started to tick up “in gross terms, not in net terms,” Furman said, describing the phenomenon as a “partial rebound.” The bounce back “can be very very fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you put the lights back on in your business. Given how many people were furloughed and how many businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. It will look like a V.”
This good news is not viewed as good news by Democratic leadership.

Politico again:
Furman’s counterintuitive pitch has caused some Democrats, especially Obama alumni, around Washington to panic. “This is my big worry,” said a former Obama White House official who is still close to the former president. Asked about the level of concern among top party officials, he said, “It’s high — high, high, high, high.”
If Trump wants to get re-elected, he needs to do everything he can to end the lockdowns.
-RW


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