I did not see anything untoward in any of the factors which I check, including the seasonality adjustment and the birth-death model adjustment.
The unemployment rate is a fairly useless measure, as it continues to improve by dropping people from the labor force. The Labor Participation Rate is much more relevent. This shows a continuing decline to the lowest level in three decades.
The median wage is also a critical indicator too often overlooked.
The bottom line is that the US is continuing in a weak and somewhat fragile recovery following a financial catastrophe of a magnitude not seen since the late 1920's. The result could have been much worse in the US. If Hoover's principles had been applied once again to the US economy, things would have been very dark this time around indeed. People overlook this. They might still get another chance to see how destructive economic malpractice can be. Europe may take a run at it. The UK appears to be willing to have a go.
The current situation is not enhanced by the deadlock in Washington, particularly with the hard line obstructionism in Congress. We may as well call it that, because that is what it is.
Efficient market theory is a fraud, and further deregulation is little more than a license to steal. It is no coincidence that the gap between the wealthy few and the public is at levels not seen since the last Great Depression. This is the mark of a very unhealthy social economy, with a few big winners and lots of losers, a kleptocracy based not on merit but on position, power, and payoffs. These distortions born of the will to power are always doomed to failure, and sometimes spectacular.
The corruption in the system acts like a huge tax on the real economy, diverting resources, labor, and investment away from productive activity and towards monopolies, cartels, and the fraudulent accumulation of wealth through the manipulation of financial assets, making money from money.
There will be no sustainable recovery until there is substantial, genuine reform of the financial and political systems, both of which have been tainted by big money and corporate power promoting a very narrow and self-servingly destructive agenda.
Agree or not, things will continue to get worse, even if in a long, dwindling cycle of decay and despair, until change comes. And it will come, one way or the other. And the longer it takes, the more volatile the outcome will be.
