Jobs picture looks brighter in relative terms, but it’s still negative
Jack Strauss, head of St. Louis University’s Simon Center for Regional Economic Forecasting, predicted today that metro St. Louis will lose about 0.1 percent of its jobs during 2009. A shrinking job market is always bad news, but Strauss’ forecast would amount to a loss of only 1,300 local jobs this year, compared with the 23,000 shed during 2008.
The surprising aspect about his prediction is that he has St. Louis faring much better than the U.S. as a whole. He thinks U.S. employment will shrink by 2.3 percent in 2009. St. Louis performed slightly better than the rest of the country last year, but over the past decade, as I pointed out in a recent column, the metro area has lost jobs while the U.S. has experienced net job creation.
When I asked Strauss why he thinks we’ll escape from our long-term underperformance, he basically said that St. Louis’ worst months should be behind it. The manufacturing job loss of the past couple of years won’t be repeated because manufacturing — especially the auto industry — is so much smaller now. Strauss explained:
What’s left in the economy is almost all services, so that’s going to be fairly stable. We’ve taken the hit already. We have a diverse economy and, relatively speaking, we’re not being hurt by construction and we aren’t being hit by housing.
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
Hooray for our team.
Me thinks it only looks brighter because people’s unemployment benefits ran out. Remember we’re now under the GOP system of record keeping.
I question why we as a society shoulld be employing so many economists in universities, government, industry, and the news media to be making forecasts about parameters such as unemployment, especially when negative forecasts tend to have the perverse effect of being self-fulfilling. Collectively, economists have been of benefit in supporting the establishment of economic stabilization programs such as unemployment insurance and government guarantees of individual accounts in banks and brokerages. But how many economists do we need to simply keep those programs functioning?
(Note: economists are probably about the only people willing to question the social/economic benefits of their own profession.)