Get Ready for MSM Cheerleadering AWESOME Economy Despite 10% Unemployment

Now that the GDP numbers are in and we have growth, many interesting debates will ensue. One thing that will almost assuredly happen is that the MSM will jump on this number to help President Obama look like an economic genius by giving us the stimulus back in January. I don't think there is a case at all that the stimulus package did a darned thing to promote the economic growth that we have seen (the growth comes from a combination of natural resiliency and the unprecendentedly loose monetary launched by Ben Bernanke), but the MSM will try to sell that line anyway. What is more interesting to me is what the NBER does. Recall that the NBER dated the recession from Q4 2007 even though we had growth in Q1 and Q2 of 2008 (pretty good growth in the case of Q2), citing the fact that employment peaked in December 2007. Well sure it did, we were scraping the bottom of the barrel - with 95.4% of us employed, the rest are pretty much the dregs of the employment pool. With the expansion that begun in 2001 getting long in the tooth, why would any employer hire the least attractive workers? So this was a weird call by the NBER, but not surprising - they are, after all, a bunch of left-leaning academics. So what do they say now? After ignoring production expansion in favor of employment to reach back and pin the recession in 2007 much more solidly within the Bush era, will they refocus on production and ignore employment data now that Obama is in office? While production may be up, unemployment is still rising. Will the NBER massage the fact that the jobs landscape still looks terrible? Odds are they will...massage it that is and state that the recession is over, rather than say that continuing employment losses mean we are still stuck in the mud.

Anyway, the MSM are alot less powerful these days and we'll see if the public buys what they are selling. 10% unemployment doesn't feel good, and Americans will know what the economy is doing by what is going on around them, not by what they read in the paper or watch on TV. However, this could be yet another opportunity for the MSM to squander its last remaining drops of credibility - telling Americans the economy is just grand as employers continue to lay people off in large numbers - in the effort to advance its favored political viewpoints.