Noted over at Zero Hedge:
The inverse silver lining to today’s jobs report that will be lost in the shuffle of what is perceived as a good NFP (despite consistent initial jobless claims of around 450K, which means that either there is a massive data error, or the rate of job creation has somehow surged) is that labor force participation has now dropped to the lowest rate it has been since 1984, at 64.5%…
The upshot of all this is that if we had labor force participation at the levels of a couple years ago the unemployment rate would be about 11.6%, rather than the official rate of 9.6% announced today. It is also a bit odd that we got this number of private sector job growth when new claims for unemployment have remained in the 450,000 range for so long – but, whether data is being manipulated or not, the harsh facts on the ground are that things are pretty lousy.
Real job creation will not resume until we set in place policies which allow for the creation of new wealth – ie, the process of making, mining and growing things. Hopefully the new Republican House will be able to force through such policies, but we’ll be forced to fight through the blank incomprehension of this by Senate Democrats and President Obama. In other words, don’t look for any significant improvement for a while.
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