ECONOMY: What jobs?

The topic of jobs or unemployment has come up in discussion on a number of occasions especially what Obama is doing to generate jobs and bring down the unemployment rate.

One of my friends posited the idea that many of the jobs that have been lost in the last few years were jobs created by the credit bubble and will never return. He makes a compelling argument which I have seen firsthand; I know of a number of people who quit their normal jobs to become mortgage writers / originators. In those days anybody could get into the mortgage business, all they had to do was write a mortgage, get it signed, and sell it to a mortgage holder who would pay the originator a commission. The originator did not have to worry if the mortgage was sound or if the person signing could ever have a chance in hell of paying it back – they took the commission check and moved on to the next one – they made a ton of money.

I would imagine that there were countless thousands of people who became mortgage originators or worked as clerks for mortgage originators and now they are all out of work and those jobs are never coming back because we hope federal regulators will prevent something like that from ever happening again.

The loose credit also encouraged people to spend foolishly buying all sorts of things they could not afford and that in turn created jobs for people making the shit that people could not afford – when credit dried up so did the manufacturing jobs – people stopped buying things they could not afford.

So I guess the question is what will these people do that have lost jobs that are never coming back? More and more people are entering the job market each year while older workers are scared to retire in our economic downturn and will hold on to their jobs as long as they can. Where are the new jobs coming from? My friend suggests that we may be facing a “permanent” 10% unemployment rate.

People are going back to school to learn new skills but what are the skills one should learn to get a job; we will eventually have enough nurses or cops or we may have enough already. Even now, I am getting resumes from skilled workers applying for non-skilled jobs that I have openings for; hamburger flippers with master’s degrees?

Some are saying that “new” industries like energy generation will create new jobs but how many? If we continue to engage in constant warfare we at least will always have openings for soldiers?

This is a topic I am sure every economist is talking about and Obama is all ears but what are the solutions. I will keep on looking…