While still a positive, there's no question that last month's jobs report was disappointing. And financial soooper-gen-i-us (/sarcasm) Jim Cramer knows who to blame. None other than Our Lady of the Sherry, Peggy Noonan.
GREGORY: Let’s look at the numbers here; the unemployment right now is 7.6%, only 88,000 jobs created. You look at the context in terms of recent months, we have that chart as well, you’ve got much fewer than we’ve seen. What’s going on?
CRAMER: This is stunning. Stunning. I think a lot of it had to do with fear-mongering. Remember we had Peggy Noonan on? Not that I don’t…she’s the fear monger in chief. The president did make people feel everything is going to shut down in the country because of the sequester. A lot of the CEOS were scared; a lot of the small business people held back, bankers would tell you that. Only Ben Bernanke, Fed Chief, got this right. He seemed to understand that the country’s hiring is really coming back down.
I know it will shock and surprise you that Peggy Noonan's appearance on last week's Meet the Press included absolutely zero comments on jobs and the sequester, proving once again that Jim Cramer cannot think his way out of a paper bag.
Jim Cramer did also call out President Obama's fear-mongering as well, which frankly, proved to be accurate when he warned that the sequester could hurt jobs. Evidential proof is a concept largely foreign to Cramer. It's interesting that Cramer adopts the framing of right wing blogs to implicate Obama.
There is little doubt that the obstruction and gamesmanship in DC surrounding the sequester, the trumped-up deficit "crisis" and absolute demand from within the Beltway for austerity measures has made an impact on hiring and jobs. Who has confidence in these yahoos in DC anymore to work on behalf of Americans? Paul Krugman:
That deficit has declined from 5.6 percent of potential GDP in 2011 to 2.5 percent in 2013 — that’s 3 percent of GDP, which is a lot of austerity. Not all of that cut has even hit yet — the sequester isn’t in the macro numbers yet — but the rise in the payroll tax is very clearly driving the latest bad numbers, which show big declines in retail.
This is really stupid; as long as we’re at the zero lower bound, austerity is a huge mistake. Yet for what, the third time since 2009, all discussion in Washington has turned away from job creation to deficits (even though the debt problem has largely faded away) and the need for an early Fed exit from stimulus (even though unemployment remains high and inflation low).
Clearly, the answer is to cut Social Security!
Would it be too much to ask NBC News to stop propping up someone with little understanding like Jim Cramer and actually be informative for their viewers?
