Does uncertainty cost the economy jobs? Fed researchers call it a big problem.
Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco say uncertainty over future taxes and other policies has raised unemployment by one to two percentage points. That's lots of jobs.
This August 2012 photo shows a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Richard Drew/AP/File
For several years many Americans have said uncertainty is holding the economy down. Now some researchers are pointing to evidence that the problem is a large one.
A mood of doubt – including uncertainty about things like future tax policies – may be to blame for a large share of America's unemployment problem, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco conclude in a report released Monday.
"Our model estimates that uncertainty has pushed up the US unemployment rate by between one and two percentage points since the start of the financial crisis in 2008," write Fed economists Sylvain Leduc and Zheng Liu. "To put this in perspective, had there been no increase in uncertainty in the past four years, the unemployment rate would have been closer to 6% or 7% than to the 8% to 9% actually registered."
Given that unemployment is usually around 5 percent even in good times, their analysis suggests that as much as half the spike in unemployment since 2008 relates to uncertainty of one kind or another, felt by consumers and businesses.
That translates into lots of jobs. For a reference point, employer payrolls in the US have expanded by about 2 million workers over the past year, as the unemployment fell by 1 percentage point.
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