The stock market is up, corporate profits are climbing, and consumer confidence is starting to inch back.

So where are the jobs?

Apparently, American companies are producing private-sector jobs, but they are creating more of them overseas than they are here.

According to a study by The Economic Policy Institute, American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with fewer than 1 million in the United States.

Had those jobs been created here, the think tank reasons, the American unemployment rate would be 8.9 percent as opposed to 9.8 percent it was last month.

But this is not just a case of greedy corporations moving low-skilled jobs overseas so they can flood the American market with cheap imports.

For one thing, the jobs that are being created abroad are not just low-skilled factory jobs. Companies are making software and semiconductors overseas, not just toys and clothes.

For another, the products that they are making are not all coming back to U.S. markets.

According to press reports, demand has grown dramatically this year in emerging markets like India, China and Brazil, where a growing middle class is buying products that once would only be sold here.

Domestic profits are a result of cost cutting by American businesses, but the companies are not going to increase their payrolls until they have more hard evidence that demand for their products will climb.

“Companies will go where there are fast-growing markets and big profits,” Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs told The Associated Press. “What’s changed is that companies today are getting top talent in emerging economies and the U.S. has to really watch out.”

The United States still has the world’s biggest economy and the most important market. The same forces that create jobs overseas would create them here if demand for goods and services were higher.

In the past decade, cheap credit was seen as the answer, but it has had a devastating result on individuals and the federal government. Both will struggle to pay for the excesses of that era.

Programs like the recent tax cut compromise should help boost demand and start the positive trend that will be needed to cut unemployment and give the nation the resources it needs to pay its bills.

 

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