Felix Salmon:
It’s never good when employment falls during what’s meant to be an economic recovery. It’s worth remembering that, if people start getting excited about today’s drop of 125,000 in the total-employment number. Yes, private-sector hiring was marginally positive, by 83,000, but we’d all like to see much bigger numbers than that.
Unemployment dropped sharply, to 9.5%. But why? It doesn’t seem to be thanks to people getting jobs: after all, employment fell. And the labor force participation rate — the number of employed people divided by the total number of people capable of working — hit another new low today, of 64.7%. If people are just giving up and removing themselves from the workforce, then a falling unemployment rate only serves to hide the bad news. What’s more, the only important statistical decline in the unemployment rate was among white women, who already have lower unemployment than just about anybody else. The rest of the country — including, crucially, men overall — was pretty much unchanged.
I don't think even Obi-Wan Kenobi would be of any help at this point.
I am Frank Chow and I approved this message
1 comment:
The important thing to remember about job growth is that anything under about 150K is still a net loss because you have people who are newly entering the work force. To be in a "recovery" and gaining substantially less than that is bad news.
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