Friday, July 3, 2009

Protectionism here we come?

The stockmarket seems to have woken up to the continuing weakness in the economy. After dreadful US June unemployment figures the indices have started to retrench from their recent enthusiasm. I spoke last night to an old freind who is now running a Wall Street firms London outpost. He came up with a frightening July 4th holiday statistic. In December 1999 official employment in the US was 130.53m.The comparable for June 2009 was 131.69m. If the American economy loses a further 1.16m jobs over the next 6 months ( not impossible after Junes loss of 467,000 ) then there will have been no new jobs created in the entire first decade of the 21st century. How long is it before someone in Congress starts blaming that on globalization? Protectionsim here we come?

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