Your Friday Morning Dose of Doom & Gloom

The good news: “Nonfarm payrolls jumped 243,000” last month.

The bad news: The unemployment rate is nowhere near the BLS’s damned lie of 8.3%. It’s somewhere more like 11.5%. I haven’t even started digging around for the U-6, but it can’t be much lower than 15%, and perhaps still higher.

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As usual, Tyler Durden is happy to scare the bejeebus out of everybody, which he did to me this morning with the following chart.

What’s it mean? I’ll let Tyler explain:

Sick of the BLS propaganda? Then do the following calculation with us: using BLS data, the US civilian non-institutional population was 242,269 in January, an increase of 1.7 million month over month: apply the long-term average labor force participation rate of 65.8% to this number (because as chart 2 below shows, people are not retiring as the popular propaganda goes: in fact labor participation in those aged 55 and over has been soaring as more and more old people have to work overtime, forget retiring), and you get 159.4 million: that is what the real labor force should be. The BLS reported one? 154.4 million: a tiny 5 million difference.

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Shorter version: The old are staying in the workforce because they must, and the young are dropping out of the workforce because they have no hope of finding work.

So forget the big, red “8.3” glowing above the mast at Drudge. This country is still very deep in a very long employment crisis.

UPDATE: Hold on to your breakfast, but 1,200,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force last month — a record.

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