Illustrating the disaster that is US Labour market:
via Ioan Smith @moved_average
The latest reading is 62% for January 2014. We are in the late 1970s, just after the infamous bouts of stagflation have ravaged the US economy, setting stage for the Reagan's 'revolution'…
In trailing news, of course, the Non-Farm Payrolls report for January was a massive miss on expectations, with only 113,000 new jobs actually recorded against the analysts' hopium fuelled 180,000 expectation.
With that, employment to population ratio (the one I track for Ireland and the one many Irish economists and media talking heads are saying I should not track - cause they don't like it) rose to 58.8%.
Unemployment fell from 6.7% to 6.6%, getting dangerously close to the Fed's imaginary 6.5% bound (the promise of Fed hiking rates at/after 6.5% is about as real currently as the promise of Mario Draghi to 'activate' OMT). But on a big positive side: unemployment rate for those with only a high school education fell from 7.1% to 6.5% as construction industry started hiring once again skill-less workers.
Note: for Ireland, participation rate currently stands at 60.7% (Q3 2013) down from 64.7 in Q3 2007 so proportionately, Irish decline is slightly smaller than the US decline...
