Treasury Secretary Welcomes you to the Recovery

It may not feel like we are in a full-fledged economic recovery yet but the Treasury Secretary seemed to imply otherwise in a recent New York Times piece entitled "Welcome to the Recovery". Although Secretary Timothy Geithner noted in the piece that we still have a long way to go, it seems a little off-putting for the Treasury Secretary to welcome us to a recovery when the unemployment rate is still well over 9% and not expected to go down much further in the near future.

A new jobs report for July is due this week but the jobs report for June wasn't terribly optimistic. A CNN.com news items about that report was titled "Job recovery hits a wall" and reported that the economy lost 125,000 jobs in June. One hopes that the July jobs report will be much stronger. Regardless, I'm sure that the millions of Americans out there who still don't have jobs don't feel like we are in a "recovery".

Liberal economist Paul Krugman even seemed surprised by Geithner's piece. After criticizing Republicans for obstructionism (unsurprisingly) and saying that the government has not done enough to stimulate the economy, Krugman wrote that "the [Obama] administration has decided to engage in happy talk, saying that it’s all good. Do they really think this will work?"

The adminisitration might think so but until a lot more jobs are added to this economy, it seems like it's too early for the Treasury Secretary to welcome us to a recovery.