http://www.slate.com/articles/busine...about_it_.html
The Jobs Stall
For 18 months we’ve been on track to never return to full employment—why won’t the Federal Reserve do something?
By Matthew Yglesias|Posted Friday, Aug. 3, 2012, at 11:41 AM ET
The underlying reality from the more precise establishment survey was sunnier—a net addition of 163,000 is a decent number. Except that in broader context, there’s nothing decent about it. Across the first half of 2012, the economy’s added 151,000 jobs per month. Across 2011, the number was 153,000 per month. Those are the kind of numbers a healthy economy would be adding. But the American economy didn’t start this period in a healthy place, and
needs to be adding jobs at double or triple that rate to get us back to full employment.
Just on Wednesday the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee met and proclaimed that “economic activity decelerated somewhat” in recent months and that it anticipated “that the unemployment rate will decline only slowly toward levels that it judges to be consistent with its dual mandate.” The guardians of macroeconomic stability, in other words, knew nothing particularly good was coming. And the truly shocking thing isn’t the news but the proposed response—to do nothing different.