J.P. Morgan Chief Investment Officer Bob Michele predicted it will take 10-12 years after the pandemic for U.S. employment to get back to its pre-coronavirus level, insisting it won’t be as simple as turning the economy back on.
“No, it’s not that simple … it’s going to take years, or longer to get back to where we are, or where we were,” Michele said on Bloomberg when asked if reopening would be as simple as “turning on the lights.”
“When you look at the congressional budget office forecast for the end of 2021, they have unemployment at 9 percent, so sure, materially better than where we’re going to peak in the high teens, but during the peak of the financial crisis, unemployment hit 10 percent,” he said. “So even looking out a year and a half from now, we’re still going to be roughly where we were at the peak of the financial crisis.”
“One of the things we did was to just predict a downdraft in the second quarter, somewhere around 10 percent, so call it 38 to 40 percent annualized, and say that’s the trough, and then start this journey back up to the longterm trend rate,” he added. “To catch up to the longterm trend rate that’s been in place, call it 1.5 percent, pre-crisis, to fill that output gap, we estimate it will take ten to twelve years.” – READ MORE
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