NFL Labor Peace Brings Employment Chaos: Business Class

Now that labor peace is at hand in the National Football League, the real chaos is beginning.

There is an unusually narrow timeframe for teams to sign (or pass on) the hundreds of free-agent players who remain on the market. Thus, the next few weeks promise to be a caffeine-fueled free-for-all.

On July 21, European leaders decided on a new plan for Greece and new rules for the European Financial Stability Facility. They also came up with two remarkable oxymorons: The private sector will voluntarily agree to losses and Greece won't default for now, but instead will selectively default on some of its obligations. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, seemed to be smiling.

Did they have reason to celebrate? While the leaders took a step in the right direction, I would argue that the glass is only one-third full. The euro zone still faces several thorny issues, but the proposals that were offered to resolve them are more in conflict than in harmony.

One of the biggest questions in determining the future sustainability of our health-care system is this: Will the 21st century witness as large an increase in the average life expectancy of the rich countries -- 30 to 40 years -- as occurred during the last century?

Most experts believe it won't. The middle estimate of the U.S. Census Bureau, for example, is that the increase in life expectancy between 2000 and 2050 will be only about seven years, and the estimated increase for the entire 21st century is just 13 years. This is less than half the increase that occurred during the 20th century. The same conservatism is evident in the projections of the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and other national and international agencies.

Bill Clinton put his finger on a distressing aspect of the U.S. jobs situation in a recent television interview. The former president remarked that openings are being filled at only half the rate of previous recessions, even though current unemployment is much higher. He stressed the bleak outlook for job-seeking construction workers and the need for retraining and skills development.

He has a point: Construction workers can't easily become nurses. And, given the weak housing market, an early return of boom times in construction is highly unlikely. So skill mismatch will persist. It slows the pace of job filling by making it harder for employers to find suitable hires.

In the midst of a downturn, good macroeconomic policy requires a solid understanding of the headwinds facing the economy. Unfortunately, policy makers often are more interested in their ideological biases than in facts. As a result, the debate has degenerated into sterile arguments: Those on the right are convinced that government intervention is holding back a robust recovery. The left argues that we need more public spending.

We need to move beyond this hackneyed debate, and doing so requires a reframing of the discussion. The optimal policy response can only be formed if we know why the economy remains weak. And in making the diagnosis, it is crucial to check ideology at the door and instead be guided by the data.

As always happens in the spring, companies reported the pay of their chief executive officers and other top leaders. And, as usual, the press and activists complained that CEOs are paid more and more, without regard for performance, and that boards aren't doing their jobs.

But there's a twist this year. The Say-on-Pay rules in the Dodd-Frank legislation required for the first time that shareholders vote on executive-pay packages. And to the surprise of many, those votes have been overwhelmingly positive. The pay policies at more than 98 percent of the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index received majority shareholder support. Almost 90 percent of those companies received favorable votes exceeding 70 percent.

The debate over whether the U.S. should abandon its long-standing accounting standards and adopt international rules that are used by most other countries often misses an important point.

While the economic case for the switch isn’t strong, failure to act carries substantial political risks for the U.S. It could also imperil the push for a global reporting regime and weaken efforts to reform other areas of global financial regulation.

Although China has been churning out its share of unpleasant news, many onlookers don't consider its problems as serious as those of other big economies.

They should think again. China’s biggest economic challenges are political in nature and daunting, and will almost certainly get worse. That is because its autocratic system, for all the stability it has provided, will struggle to handle the sustained economic slowdown the country is likely to confront during this decade.

It appears another rescue is on the way for Greece. It won't solve the currency union's problems. The real threat to the euro isn't that a weak peripheral country like Greece might withdraw in an effort to devalue its way to competitiveness, but rather that Germany might want to pull out.

Germany's incentive to leave grows with each bailout, and Berlin could ultimately make a simple calculation that extrication will be less costly than continuing the sacrifice needed to keep the euro.

The Federal Reserve’s experiment with a second round of quantitative easing is nearing an end. Did it achieve its goal of lowering interest rates and stimulating the economy?

Should we remember QE2 as a brilliant innovation, a central piece of the Fed’s future recession and deflation-fighting toolkit? Or is it the first step toward hyperinflation? When the Fed stops buying government bonds, will interest rates rise sharply because no one else is buying?