This blog post is based on a comment I made on Kevin J. Gamble's blog article Jobs: The trend line is not positive. Gamble's article in turn was also based on a comment he intended to make in another blog article that also describes the magnitude of the job creation challenge that faces most advanced economies in the aftermath of the "global financial crisis" (GFC).The thesis of Gamble's article and the article he refers to is the reality that there may be no jobs to go back to despite all efforts to "create" new ones to replace those that were obliterated by the collapse.
And here is what I think:
I think there are no jobs to go back to because most of the ones that were lost were created on the back of a layer of perceived value that coated the core of tangible value in our economies' asset base before this crisis. The GFC I believe and as I have read in many articles, at its most fundamental, serves as a severe test of asset value. Not surprisingly, it is assets that lack substance that are at biggest risk.
