JPJones – Why shouldn’t unemployment be low? It seems to me that what has been going on over the last decade is a steady drum beat of how horrible things are. The news makes more money by printing stories about how bad things are then about good things. Last consumer sentiment was terrible. But things aren’t terrible. People just listen to what they’ve been told, and they’ve been told the world is heading for disaster. The economy is doing very nicely. People are working and spending. Yeah, fed rate is up to 5%. That’s not a huge deal, it only seems so because we got used to ZIRP. There’s some inflation but hey this ain’t Zimbabwe. The stock market has been in the doldrums for a while now, but so what. Maybe we do get a recession in the near future, maybe not. But you should stop listening to whomever is convincing you that things are bad and collapse is just around the corner.
I wasn’t trying to say things were bad. Things aren’t bad, which is pretty sweet, but I thought they might be based on what I was seeing in the numbers. 5-6% interest rates on a mortgage is considered ideal, so yeah, that’s not bad, either. 3.4% unemployment? That’s too low and is one big reason inflation is still uncomfortably high (4.3%). It’s also what I see as the biggest reason housing prices are steady or moving up both locally and nationally.
