Another Jobless Recovery

216,000 jobs disappeared last month, according to yesterday’s Labor Department report. The New York Times therefore calls the ongoing economic recovery a jobless one. Nevertheless, the paper says the Obama Administration believes its stimulus package and multiple bailouts have helped prevent job losses from being even worse. The story tries to determine where a jobs-oriented recovery might come from but comes up empty: Government coffers are tapped, consumer spending is down, and credit remains tight, leaving any answer shrouded in mystery. Yet Vice President Biden refused to hide behind the rhetoric, saying, according to the Wall Street Journal, "Less bad is not good. That's not how President Obama and I measure success." Teenage unemployment, notes the Times, is also at 25.5 percent, its highest level since the metric’s inception in 1948. “The number of private-sector jobs is now slightly below the level of August 1999,” a lost decade of jobs, writes the Washington Post.

Speaking of credit, constructions loans are off, which is worrisome for banks, writes the Times. That doesn’t bode well for the local banks that specialize in them. It’s not just that the numbers are down; the prospects for outstanding loans to be repaid are looking grimmer every day. “10.4 percent of commercial construction loans are troubled,” one analyst told the paper, but the numbers will probably get worse. Given the local-level issues, it’s no surprise that a handful more banks were shuttered by the FDIC this weekend, reports the AP. That makes 89 for the year.

More shocking are the plans of two newspapers, the Times and the Journal, to create San Francisco editions. The Times reports on itself and Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper, saying both organizations see the media-starved yet erudite Bay Area as a perfect place to incubate a new regional edition strategy nationwide. One or the other may wish to have a look at the Hartford, Conn., market next, where the Courant has gotten in trouble for republishing, without credit in some cases, rewrites of stories from its competitor, the Manchester Journal Inquirer. The Washington Post says the Courant’s editor apologized to readers for printing the Journal Inquirer’s stories but not for running them on the Web as an “aggregator.”

Back to banking. The administration continues to push financial regulatory reform, says the Post. The centerpiece of the plan is that, “regulators would require all financial firms to hold larger capital reserves against unexpected losses. The largest firms would be forced to set aside even greater reserves.” The banking industry seems in no position to argue but will anyway, at least over the finer points of the new rules. The plan will be presented at the G-20 conference, where Europeans are already decrying American bonuses, says the AP.

The Journal details major problems in the SEC's investigations of Bernard Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme. The agency’s inspector general released a report uncovering evidence that the SEC knew as early as 2003 that Madoff might be a scammer, based on an e-mail from executives at hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. Also, despite being in Madoff’s famed Lipstick Building offices for audits in 2005 and catching him in multiple lies, SEC investigators never went up to the 17^th floor, where the scheme was allegedly managed.

Boeing gets good news from the WTO, as it rules that Airbus’s government subsidies are illegal. The Journal reports that EADS, Airbus’s parent, could be forced to repay billions in loans from EU governments. The five-year-long dispute, which revolved around funding for the massive Airbus A380, could open the door for Boeing to contest future government aid for other planes.