Perhaps no recovery of peak employment should be expected

1 Apr 2011 by Jim Fickett.

Adjusted for population growth (the dashed line in the graph below shows 1%/year), jobs never did regain their peak level after the 2001 recession.

I would attribute this partly to globalization – many lower-skilled jobs moved offshore and are never coming back – and partly to government policies of trying to substitute cheap money and speculation for productive growth. Neither of these is likely to change.

Many different points of view suggest slow jobs growth, then. And since the bank rescues made the too-big-to-fail problem worse, not better, we are likely to see another financial crisis. So there is a good chance that once again in the current case, jobs will never regain their pre-recession peak level, adjusted for population.