he subject of this article has become taboo. I apologise for raising it on customarily polite pages – and on a Saturday – but sometimes nice people find themselves in nasty situations – such as monthly job growth of only 54,000 two years into a recovery – and a certain flexibility is needed.
That is why I want to talk about economic stimulus: stimulus, billions of dollars of it, fiscal and monetary. If that does not make you sick to the sacrum then we can talk about bail-outs as well. After the deficit spending and quantitative easing used to revive the economies of the advanced world in recent years these topics are toxic. But yesterday’s jobs report was toxic as well. Almost every sector of the economy was weak, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.1 per cent. It points to a stumble in the US recovery – and where the US goes the world follows.
The revulsion caused by talk of stimulus is understandable. The tax cuts, spending increases and bank bail-outs used to fight the recession of 2007-09 have left behind huge budget deficits and sovereign debt crises in countries such as Ireland; in the US, UK and Japan interest rates are still at or close to zero. People want to fix these problems and get back to normal, not take more crisis measures.