Well, the unemployment report came forth.
Not pretty at all. 9.1% headline rate, 64+% participation rate. And that combination will have its effect:
...the participation rate was unchanged at 64.2%. Note: This is the percentage of the working age population in the labor force. I expect the participation rate to move a little higher as the job market improves, and that will keep the unemployment rate elevated all year....
Then you add in the actual number of jobs created, and you get this:
There have been 783,000 total non-farm jobs added this year or 157 thousand per month. This is a better pace of payroll job creation than last year, but the economy still has 6.95 million fewer payroll jobs than at the beginning of the 2007 recession. At this pace (157 thousand jobs per month), it will take almost 4 years just to get back to the pre-recession level.
November 2012 comes a lot faster than "4 years."
Good.
UPDATE: Vox pitches in with even worse news.
...the real U3 unemployment rate has been over 11 percent since 2010, as I originally predicted. However, the BLS has concealed this very high rate of unemployment by the simple tactic of reducing the size of the labor force despite the growing population of the country. This is only one of the many reasons that Mises was correct to condemn the use of statistical empiricism in economics; the statistics are neither reliable nor represent a consistent metric.
There is no mystery and it is not true that "nobody is sure why it's happening." The reason it is happening is completely obvious: there is no economic recovery.
HT: CalcRisk
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3 comments:
We now have zero growth in employment in terms of our total population since the financial crisis began.
The unemployment crisis continues without any hope in sight. Not from anyone in Congress, not from the President, not from the Fed. not from anyone. Instead, we want deficit reduction and we want it with 8 million people looking for a job and paying no taxes. We want it with sub 2% GDP growth.
As I've said for 3 years, this episode will go down as one of the worst tragedies in American history before it's over. We've become incapable of helping ourselves. We've gone from denial to complete paralysis.
To your update: I think the data has been pretty transparent actually. You can look pretty much anywhere on the St. Louis "FRED" database and see the miserable economic data.
Wow, Bush's residual effect screwed us even worse than we thought.
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