We’ve all seen the recent “unemployment” figures, purporting to show improvement in the US economy.<\/p>\n
Yeah, right.\u00a0 And aren’t ye all a wee bit auld to be a’ believin’ in Leprechauns?<\/p>\n
A couple of Wall Street advisers<\/a> say that those figures are, to be kind, grossly misleading.\u00a0 Some might even say that they’re deliberately understated.<\/p>\n The actual unemployment rate, including discouraged workers who have quit looking for work, is well over 10%.\u00a0 Hell, the U6 unemployment rate – which includes both underemployed and discouraged workers – is still over 13%, and has been for over 5 years (since Dec 2008)<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 (For the record:\u00a0 during the Bush (43) Administration, U6 was above 13% in precisely one month – Dec 2008 – and was 11% or higher only 4 months:\u00a0 Sep-Dec 2008.)\u00a0 Finally:\u00a0 the labor participation rate – which measures, oh, the actual percentage of US residents who actually have a job, full- or part-time – in Dec 2013 was 62.8<\/strong><\/em>%.<\/p>\n Participation rate-wise, that’s “welcome to Carter Country” territory.<\/p>\n There’s one more little nugget of “good news”.\u00a0 If you’re old enough, you may remember something called a “misery index”.\u00a0 It was popular in the 1970s and 1980s as a way to measure the combined effect of inflation and unemployment.<\/p>\n Calculated using today’s suspect “official” methodology, it comes out at around 7.5%.\u00a0 However, the method of calculation has changed since the 1980s.\u00a0 Inflation is now calculated “differently” (e.g., using a method that comes out with a far lower rate).\u00a0 And the unemployment rate used doesn’t include discouraged workers – you know, those folks who want to work but have been unsuccessfully looking for a job for so long that they’ve simply quit looking.<\/p>\n If the misery index were calculated today using the same inflation methodology used during the 1970s and 1980s and including discouraged workers, it would be 14.7%.\u00a0 That’s higher than it was during the Ford Administration.<\/p>\n Yeah, I don’t think we should be singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” just yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"