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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > August > 24
Monday, August 24, 2009
Editorial: Mixed economic stats offer some hope, even in Ohio
One thing there’s no shortage of these days is economic statistics. Or media reports about them.
You hear statistics about jobs, car sales, housing sales and housing permits; about salaries, stock prices, profits, consumer confidence. You name it.
And all the stats seem to be about comparisons. With the same month last year. With last month. With the same four-month period last year.
Some of the stats look pretty good. Some look bad. The result is a bonanza for spinners.
Want to argue that all that has been done by the government since the collapse of the financial sector last fall has been in vain? No problem. Want to argue that we were saved from a collapse into a full-fledged depression. Also easy.
And yet the spinning itself is a good sign. After all, a few months ago there was no spinning to be done. Things were just simply awful and getting worse by any accounting.
Now, though, for example, in the Dayton area, permits for the construction of new houses are up by almost a fourth, pitting July against June.
And there’s this headline: “GM adds shifts, boosts output.” You have to admit you didn’t expect to see that news for a while, if ever again. It came after the Cash for Clunkers program brought nearly half a million people in to buy new cars, with more apparently primed to do so.
Even though the biggest selling cars have been Japanese, the Detroit-based automakers have done well.
At the end of last week, the feds announced an end to the clunker program. But the automakers had already known it was reaching its limit.
Obviously, the clunker program provided an artificial, temporary boost. But, still, the fact is that people are spending money, are incurring new debt. That’s a decided change.
On the bad side, the official unemployment rate in Ohio rose from 11.1 to 11.2 percent in July. And yet the number of jobs grew marginally, by 9,800. This was the second time in three months that the number of jobs had not shrunk significantly. In the previous year, the drop had been about a quarter million.
National indicators are mixed, too, but stock market numbers suggest some confidence about corporate profits. Such confidence had once disappeared.
One way to take a shortcut through all the numbers is to check out what the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is saying. Not that he’s God or anything. But he does have the task of analyzing all the stats and reporting in a nonpartisan way.
On Friday, Aug. 21, Chairman Ben Bernanke said the economy is now “poised to grow,” an upgrade from his recent suggestions that it had “leveled out,” that the recession was ending.
Of course, he’s not talking about a lot of growth. But when you figure that he was worried late last year about an economic cataclysm — what with banks and investment houses collapsing almost daily — you have to feel a little better.
It’ll be a long road back, at best, with some stats continuing to look bad. Unfortunately, by nearly all prognostications, one of the worst will be the unemployment rate. For many individuals, the worst is yet to come.
Yet the feeling that the society as a whole may have made it through the roughest patch is worth savoring.
Someplace in between the society as a whole and the individual are the state of Ohio and the Dayton region. At those levels, much still depends upon the circumstances and decisions of specific industries.
Let’s just say the overall environment in which they operate has been worse.
