Double-dips are good for ballroom dancers and useful to economists.
The first is obvious. If you can execute an elegant dip or two during a tango it goes a long way toward obscuring flaws in the rest of your routine.
The same is true for double-dip recessions, which you will be hearing a lot more about over the next week.
It’s hard to find an expert who correctly predicted the economy would be sinking again this summer. OK, this column did.
But my sources and I understood that much of the economic gains this past spring were an illusion caused by faulty seasonal adjustments.
So it was pretty easy to anticipate that business conditions would look worse once these adjustments corrected themselves.
Next Friday we’ll get a correction that’ll put the words “double-dip” back into the headlines.
That’s when the Commerce Department will announce that the nation’s gross domestic product didn’t grow at the previously believed 2.4 percent annual rate during this year’s second quarter.
Experts expect the number to be downgraded to just 1.4 percent, although it might actually not be that bad.
Whatever the figure turns out to be, it’ll get people’s attention. And chatter will begin immediately about whether the economy has been contracting during the current third quarter.
Economists will find the concept of a double-dip useful because it will help them explain away poor predictions.
Business was growing, they’ll argue, but forces that couldn’t be anticipated interfered. (That’s the fancy footwork.)
So, are we going to have a fancy double-dip that we’ll be able to tell our grandkids about? Actually, the question is moot.
For one thing, the National Bureau of Economic Research — which has taken upon itself the task of declaring when recessions start and end — hasn’t yet officially declared the end of the Great Recession that began in the final months of 2007.
And it doesn’t seem like the group is in any hurry to do so, especially now that the economy is weakening and job growth, which the NBER keeps close tabs on, is minuscule.
Recessions are loosely defined as two quarters of GDP shrinkage. After all revisions, this recession had six weak quarters in a row — five with negative GDP and one quarter with just a teeny gain.
When the final figures are produced years from now, historians might just decide that this was just one long downturn — not a series of dips.
Hurrah for us! We are part of history.
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This is one of those weeks when stock options expire. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the stock market staged one of its patented triple-digit gains on Tuesday, followed by a lot of nothing yesterday.
Tuesday’s 104-point increase in the Dow Jones industrial average had been much bigger before an afternoon sell-off — probably by traders who’ve come to distrust both option week shenanigans and summertime rallies that occur without any news to back them up.
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This is one-upmanship at its best.
I recently wrote about Kathy Chambers, who finally got a part-time job after applying for 1,056 positions over the past three years.
Mark Stolerman says he can top that. “I have sent out at least 5,000 to 10,000 resumes for jobs in NYC (paying) at least $40K-$50K. I have not been able to find anything at all,” he told me in an e-mail.
And, Stolerman said, “I am going to do something drastic.”
Whoa, boy! Put down that envelope and move away from the mailbox.
“I am going to go down to Wall Street, Penn Station, and Grand Central Station with a huge sign on me and hand out cover letters and resumes,” he added, to my relief.
And Stolerman says he is now willing to work 60-hour weeks and accept just $30,000 a year — pro ving that both produc tivity and deflation are indeed rampant.
Readers, please give this guy a job before he shows up with a sandwich board at a public place near you. Or at least place an ad on his sign.
Mark’s qualification: BA from Albany State, lots of experience in sales and technology, plus he spelled everything correctly in the e-mail.
Can anyone out there top 10,000 resumes? Call Guinness, I think we have a world record.