Wallowing

No man is an island, entire of itself. -- John Donne

   Five years have gone by since the global financial crisis, but many nations are still struggling to resume their growth potential.
   For example, U.S. firms added 162,000 jobs in July, notching the unemployment rate down to 7.4 percent, but that's still too high a level. There were still 11.5 million people out of work, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said, with 37 percent of these unemployed for 27 weeks or more.
   Even so,  Labor Secretary Tom Perez called the report "good news." He said the economic turnaround over the past four years "has been unmistakable." But he added that "we can and must do more to pick up the pace of this recovery."
   Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund called for a "concerted effort" by the world's largest economies to coordinate policies in "mutually reinforcing ways" in order to lift global output.
   In its annual "Spillover Report" -- a variation of the principle of unintended consequences -- the IMF said worldwide economic risks have abated, but the agency warned that unless there is a concerted effort by policymakers in the top five economic regions, action by one or more of the five could spill over and affect other, smaller economies adversely.
   Tensions and risks in these five -- China, the euro area, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States -- "have lessened, but these economies are not contributing to global activity as much as they might."
   The challenge, according to the IMF report, is for large economies to find policies that encourage their own growth "without complicating, through spillovers, economic management in other countries."
   Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has been slowly adding jobs, with the unemployment rate of 7.4 percent the lowest since 2008. At the same time, however, while personal income rose by $45.4 billion , or 0.3 percent in June, according to another government report, expenditures were up by $59.4 billion, or 0.5 percent.
   So while more people are finding jobs, Americans are spending money faster than they make it. And there are still 11.5 million workers unemployed, with 51 of the country's 372 metro areas reporting jobless rates of 10 percent or more. In the commonwealth of Puerto Rico, all eight of that island's metro areas reported unemployment rates above 12 percent, with an overall jobless rate for the island of 13.8 percent. Only 26 metro areas throughout the country had jobless rates below 5 percent.