The Ignorant Investor

WASHINGTON - The efficiency of American workers rose in 2005 at the slowest pace since the recession year of 2001 while a key gauge of wage pressures rose at the fastest pace in five years, the government reported Thursday.

If you've been reading about the economy over the past few years, you know that among bullish pundits, politicians, and central bankers, the answer to every worry about the economy or doom and gloom scenario has always focused on the tremendous improvements in productivity of the American worker. Productivity has become the Jeeves to our flighty, spend-thrift Bertie Wooster style economy. Always there to step in and set things right just as the situation seems to be collapsing into farce.

Well, today's report stuck the first shiv into old Jeeves. Wall Street is looking at his prostrate body, watching the paramedics work on him, and it does not like what it sees. Oil is up, commodities prices are hot, now wages rising.

Nobody knows whether we're entering the denouement of the current boom. War spending, oil prices, huge trade and budget deficits, global overcapacity and a cooling real estate market- the threads of this farce are coming together for the big final scene where Bertie Wooster always ends up with egg on his face, deeply embarrassed.

Where is our Jeeves, now?