JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) Says it’ll Take Four Years to Recover Lost Recession Jobs

Economists from JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), even with a more positive outlook for economic growth in the U.S than other economists, still say it’ll take four years for the jobs lost during the current recession to be replaced.

Their optimism doesn’t impress or convince me at all, as the job market is far from bottoming out yet, and even though job losses are starting to slow down, they continue to grow, with most economists believing they’ll go beyond 10 percent before a turnaround begins.

This doesn’t take into account the much higher projection of 3.5 percent growth rate over the last half of 2009, and a 3.2 percent growth rate for 2010. Other economists have predicted a much lower 2.4 percent economic growth rate.

So even with the best-case scenario presented by JPMorgan economists, they still think it will take four years to recover jobs lost in the recession, so we can assume at least a five or six year job recovery period if the lower growth rates of other economists are more accurate.

According to Labor Department data released last week, another 263,000 jobs were cut in September, bringing the unemployment rate to 9.8 percent, the largest rate in 26 years. Of course it’s much worse than that, as the underemployed and those who have quit looking for jobs aren’t included in those figures. Data also revealed that approximately 824,000 more jobs were lost for the time period ending March 2009 than was originally calculated, making the employment situation even worse than thought.

What that does to statistics is show we’ve in reality lost 8 million jobs since the last month of 2007, than the 7.2 million now recorded.

So even with the much larger projection from JPMorgan economists, it is thought that it will take until 2013 before jobs are brought back from recession losses. Like I said though, we haven’t started to gain jobs back, so I believe that’s a far more positive outlook than warranted by the realities we face.
 
JPMorgan admits if companies don’t start to look at expanding, that a sustainable recovery won’t happen. Expansion is the key to their numbers working, and they added if expansion doesn’t happen by early 2010, it could take a lot longer to create new jobs and get back to where we were at the end of 2007 than they predict at this time.

Personally I’m not convinced by these assertions by economists from JPMorgan, as to me it assumes the best case scenario in most metrics to work, and I don’t believe their numbers have a chance of working, and jobs will take much longer than 2013 to recover in the U.S.