Morning Joe takes a look this morning at what's happening with the real, non-stock market recession.
"Let's turn to President Trump and the top economic adviser touting the status of the economic recovery. Here's President Trump and Larry Kudlow Friday," Willie Geist said.
KUDLOW: These gains are very, very broad based. There's still too many people out, still too much hardship, too much unemployed. We're working on that and moving in the right direction. That's why today's numbers are encouraging and optimistic. My view, we are in a V-shaped recovery, it's a self-sustaining recovery.
"Joining us, Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Rattner. Larry Kudlow talking about the August jobs, still going to the V-shaped recovery. What does it look like to you? Is it a V?" Geist said.
"Well, they can call it a V-shaped recovery come hell or high water but I think the facts are different. You see on the first chart, it doesn't look like a V. You see an economy that was in free fall, particularly in the month of April, lost over 22 million jobs in a space of a little more than a month," Rattner said.
"And then you can see the beginnings of the climb back. In May, 2.7 million jobs added, June 4.8 but then the pace of jobs have been slowed, July, 1.7 million jobs and August the numbers that came out on Friday were reported as 1.4 million jobs. But inside that there are over 200,000 temporary census workers who will be off the payrolls in the another month or two. So, in fact, it was really 1.1 million jobs. So the pace of job recovery is slowing fairly dramatically."
Rattner pointed out that lower income, women, and people of color were hit disproportionately hard.
"If you are a Black person, 11.2% of Blacks lost their jobs compared to 6.4% of whites. If you have less than a high school diploma, almost 19% of those folks lost their jobs. If you have a college degree, you probably didn't lose your job at all because virtually none of them lost their jobs since this started. Between women and men you see another disparity --"
"And I want to underline this one number. Keep this chart up," Scarborough said.
"So the statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that if you have a college degree, that only 0.1%, 0%, 0.1% of people with college degrees lost their jobs, but almost 20% of people who have less than a college degree lost their jobs?"
"Sure, Joe. If you go to a restaurant and there's a busboy and a waiter, so on, maybe waiters are out of work actors with college degrees or you're in the kitchen or you work at a theme park as a greeter, what kind of degree do you think most of those people have? I would contrast that with people on the set right now. I think all of us have college degrees and we're all still employed. The folks in my industry are still employed, very little job loss in the finance industry in part because the stock market is doing so well.
"So this is a recession and a recovery that is hitting people very, very differently depending on upon their education, whether they're of color and whether they're a woman," Rattner concluded.
