It’s all a financial mirage
By Bill Holter
GoldSeek.com
Monday, 6 October 2014
Friday was Non farm payroll day with an announced 248,000 new jobs created in September, the unemployment rate dropped to 5.9%. This is the lowest unemployment rate since 2008 so it “looks” like we have recovered and the financial crisis should only be a bad memory. I am going to tell you we are living in a financial mirage.
In September, if you look under the hood you will also see 315,000 no longer included in the labor force bringing the total up to 92.6 million people. Looking back to 2008, there were 78 million “not in the labor force” so we can see a nearly 15 million person increase in this category since then. We also had an “adjustment” of a negative 26,000 jobs subtracted to arrive at the 248,000 figure, so if believable the real job growth was 274,000. “Believable”? Not by me, here is Paul Craig Roberts take More Bad News From The Jobs Front — Paul Craig Roberts – PaulCraigRoberts.org . My point is this, there are 15 million more people “not working” since 2008 but for “appearance sake” are categorized as “not in the workforce” or not looking for a job. Doing some very simple math, what do these 15 million represent? Somewhere between 4% and 5% of the entire U.S. population, that’s what!
So we have the “lowest” unemployment since 2008 at 5.9% and this headline will be splashed all over the headlines that say “happy times are here again!”. Before doing the very difficult math of “how much does 5.9 + four or five equal?”, I would like to point something out. We are now about 30 days away from the national midterm elections, could the unemployment rate have been “engineered” downward to paint a rosy picture so the balance of power in the Senate remains Democrat? This was the very last employment number the public will see before they “vote early and vote often”. OK, I know you were dying to do the math, 5.9% plus either four or five percent equals either 9.9% or 10.9% … Of course, if unemployment was calculated the way it was back in the 1980’s we would have a figure approaching 20% but that would be totally unacceptable for the financial mirage we are living.
The Rest…HERE
