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As much as the US economy is struggling, exports have been strong ever since the recession ended. According to Jay C. Shambaugh , of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown, exports have risen 23% since the end of the recession. This is easily explained by the weakness of the dollar, right? The costs for US goods abroad have decreased along with the strength of the US economy. Not so fast, says Shambaugh. Writing at Econbrowser , he points out that the patterns of where exports have risen do not match the dollar's relative decline: The takeaway for Shambaugh seems to be that, while exports can not serve as the fix for the US economy's problems, their relative strength is a sign that the foundation might not be as cracked as some suggest: The ability of U.S. firms to increase production and sell to markets where demand is growing is just more evidence that the U.S. economy is not fundamentally flawed or broken. Firms can find workers and increase output where they have customers. Yet while exports to growing foreign markets have been soaring, at home, residential construction has collapsed, structures investment by firms has collapsed, and state and local government spending has declined. All of these are a serious brake on demand. Compounding all this is the fact that real Federal Government consumption expenditures and gross investment in the third quarter was 2% below that of a year ago. This acts as a further brake on growth in output and employment. Some businesses may complain about fear of regulation (though in surveys their number one complaint is lack of customers) and some commentators may worry about structural unemployment and a lack of appropriate skills amongst the U.S. work force. There is plenty of reason to always make sure that supply side policies are sensible and worker training and education is adequate. But these do not seem to be the problems of today. Based on exports, the evidence shows that where there is demand for their products, American firms are more than ready to produce and to sell. Read What can exports tell us about the economy? here .

At the Economix blog, Laura D’Andrea Tyson says that as some of the world's largest economies try to avoid a double-dip recession, it is important for policy makers to attack the jobs crisis. And the only way to make progress in fighting the crisis, she argues, is to correctly diagnose the cause: As one small-business owner told The Los Angeles Times, “If you don’t have the demand, you don’t hire the people.” And the majority of economists agree on this diagnosis. They also agree that the recovery from a balance-sheet recession can be agonizingly long, with significantly slower growth and a significantly higher unemployment rate for at least a decade. Recent data indicate that the United States is on such a course, and many economists are now drawing comparisons between it and Japan during the two “lost decades” following Japan’s 1989-90 financial crisis and ensuing balance-sheet recession. A recent study by the economist Robert Gordon confirmed that the shortfall in private-sector demand, especially the demand for consumer services, residential and commercial construction, and consumer durables, is the primary cause of shortfalls in production and jobs. Read Recovering From a Balance-Sheet Recession here .

Time Magazine 's latest cover story bears a somewhat optimistic headline: Where the Jobs Are . But the picture is not all rosy. Assistant Managing Editor Bill Saporito checks in on companies that are hiring, and finds that some of them are having trouble finding the right people to fill jobs, even in places like Southeastern Michigan with an unemployment rate above 13%. The big takeaway from the article is that job placement experts expect the number of job openings to continue to grow: Grownups with actual work experience may be seeing more daylight. Gautam Godhwani, CEO of Simply Hired, which aggregates job openings from employment websites like CareerBuilder.com, company sites and newspapers, says his site's leading indicator is flashing green. "Before the downturn happened, we had 5 million job openings. This dropped to 2.1 million job openings in the first months of 2009, and lo and behold, in the second half of 2009 the bottom fell out of the economy," he explains. The reverse is now happening. "In the last six months we're back to 5 million jobs in our database. So there are some reasons to be optimistic." The $64,000 question is, So where are those 5 million jobs? Some of the answer is obvious. Health care and education, the perennial job comets, are doing well. But professional and business services will do well too. That's a category that includes firms like Deloitte but also office-cleaning companies. According to an analysis by Moody's Analytics for TIME, professional and business services will create some 119,000 jobs this year for bachelor's-degree holders. That's more than health care and education will create in the same category. (Health care and education will generate more jobs for graduate-degree holders than will business services.) There also seems to be a virtuous circle beginning to take shape. CareerBuilder.com reports that 27% of the companies it surveyed across all sectors plan to add salespeople, an indication that firms of all stripes see rising revenue opportunities. At the same time, they will be advertising openings in like numbers for IT and call-center jobs. "In terms of sales jobs, we've seen everything listed from a basic entry-level representative to team leaders," says CareerBuilder spokeswoman Jennifer Grasz. "The company is going out with the sales force to get new business, being supported by the IT folk, and the call center is working to keep the customers they get happy," she says . Read the full article here .

Scroll back the images in your mind to September of 2008, and you are likely to remember the ubiquitous shots of finance workers walking out of the offices of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, or even firms that didn't close but cut jobs. It seemed as though the Global Economic Crisis was hitting the sector hard. And yet Wall Street firms recovered relatively quickly. As Nelson Schwartz of the New York Times reported this weekend, New York Stock Exchange members had record profits in 2009. And now the jobs are coming back. New York securities companies have added "nearly 2,000 jobs" since February, in data cited by Schwartz. And, he adds, this is part of a national trend. Unfortunately, the trend in the finance sector stands out, as this Times graphic shows: Read Wall St. Hiring in Anticipation of an Economic Recovery here .

New data released by the Graduate Management Admission Council shows hiring of people with MBAs is dropping off considerably this year. According to the 2009 GMAC Corporate Recruiters Survey , recruiters hired, on average, 12 new MBAs in 2008. This year they expect to hire six. And the total number of firms planning on hiring MBAs has dropped 9%. The good news: companies that hire MBAs plan on paying them nearly double what they pay new employees without graduate management degrees. As a result of the down jobs market, a lot of business school grads are choosing to go back into the fields they worked in before grad school, rather than use B-School as a stepping stone into new fields, according to the Wall Street Journal : With firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns -- which used to bring on upward of 800 M.B.A.s combined every year -- now defunct, and fewer finance jobs around, more business-school graduates are leaning on their experience to get them in the door. For example, the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business has typically placed 50% of its M.B.A. alumni in finance, most at large investment banks. This year, students in all majors have been turning back to their previous fields to find work, says Char Bennington, Chicago's senior associate director of career management. Ms. Bennington says other industries, like consulting and marketing, are also hiring fewer people and looking for experience. Read With Jobs Tight, M.B.A.s Head for Home here .