Americans in labor force at 35-year low at 63.4 percent

Millions of Americans are off from work this Labor Day. But millions of others are off nearly every day because they have no job—or have given up looking for one.

"It's just a very tough job market now. There's no other way of putting it," said Daniel Opler, professor of history and a labor expert at the College of Mount St.Vincent.

"And the least skilled are in the toughest spot. It's a daunting task to find a job these days," he said.

According to a survey released last month by recruiting firm Express Employment Professionals—using Bureau of Labor Statistics data and its own findings—the number of Americans in the labor force, or those working or seeking a job, is at a 35-year low of 63.4 percent. That translates into some 89.9 million Americans who are not working or seeking work.

This number might seem like a contradiction to the falling overall unemployment rate—from a high of 10 percent in October 2009 to a recent 7.4 percent in July. But a big part of the decline is likely due to the millions who have taken themselves out of the job market, said Bob Funk, CEO of Express Employment.

"It's a tragedy so many people have given up looking for work, " he said. "It's older people and younger people that have in essence just thrown in the towel." Read more >>

Greek Youth Unemployment Soars To Record 65%

What little hope there may have been that bad and/or deteriorating Greek economic data had peaked in the early part of 2013 and the country was set for a long overdue "recovery" was promptly extinguished following today's latest release of the Greek May labor force survey.

The headline news for the broader population was ugly:

The number of employed was 3,621,153, a decline of 14,889 from April, and down 171,356 from a year earlier

The number of unemployed was a record high 1,381,088, an increase of 43,467 from April, and up 193,668 from a year earlier

The unemployment rate was a record high 27.6%, up from 26.9% in April and 23.8% a year earlier

But that was the "good" news. Read more >>

Real March Unemployment Rate: 11.6%

Today, we got the laughable news that the unemployment rate declined even as those not in the labor force grew by over 660,000, while the total civilian non-institutional population grew by just 167,000 to 244,995, meaning the actual labor force declined by 496,000. Which is precisely the issue: fudging the labor force participation rate is how the Obama administration has managed to maintain the myth the economy has grown under his leadership for the past 4+ years.

It hasn't, and in fact if one renormalizes for the recent long-term average participation rate of 65.8%, one gets a very different number. How different? A difference that is now at a record compared to what is reported. As the chart below shows, a "renormalization" process indicates a massive and record 4% difference between the reported unemployment rate of 7.6%, and what the real unemployment rate is assuming normal growth of the labor force, which in March was 11.6%, up from 11.3% in February, and the highest since August 2012 when it was 11.7%. More importantly, as the real unemployment chart shows, the economy has not improved by one bit since 2009! Read more >>

The Chart That Proves Mainstream Media Is Lying About Unemployment

The mainstream media is absolutely giddy that the U.S. unemployment rate has hit a "four-year low" of 7.7 percent.  But is unemployment in the United States actually going down?  After all, you would think that it should be.

The Obama administration has "borrowed" more than 6 trillion dollars from future generations of Americans, interest rates have been pushed to all-time lows, and the Federal Reserve has been wildly printing more money in a desperate attempt to "stimulate" the economy.  So have those efforts been successful?

Well, according to the mainstream media, the U.S. unemployment rate is falling steadily.  Headlines all over the nation boldly declared that "236,000 jobs" were added to the economy in February, but what they didn't tell you was that the number of Americans "not in the labor force" rose by 296,000.

And that is how they are getting the unemployment rate to go down - by pretending that huge numbers of unemployed Americans don't want jobs.  Sadly, as you will see below, the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that have a job is just 0.1% higher than it was exactly three years ago.  And we have not even come close to getting back to where we were before the last economic crisis. Read more >>

2.5 million unemployed Americans were not counted as unemployed

October 5. Today’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows 114,000 new jobs in September and a drop in the rate of unemployment from 8.1% to 7.8%. As 114,000 new jobs are not sufficient to stay even with population growth, the drop in the unemployment rate is the result of not counting discouraged workers who are defined away as “not in the labor force.”

According to the BLS, “In September, 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force.” These individuals “wanted and were available for work,” but “they were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.”

In other words, 2.5 million unemployed Americans were not counted as unemployed. The stock market rose on the phony good news. Bloomberg’s headline: “U.S. Stocks Rise as Unemployment Rate Unexpectedly Drops,” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-05/u-s-stock-futures-little-changed-before-payrolls-report.html .

A truer picture of the dire employment situation is provided by the 600,000 rise over the previous month in involuntary part-time workers. According to the BLS, “These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.” Turning to the 114,000 new jobs, once again the jobs are concentrated in lowly paid domestic service jobs that cannot be offshored. Manufacturing jobs declined by 16,000. Read more >>

U6 unemployment, the more relevant measure is 14.7%.

President Obama is speaking at George Mason University today (traffic is insane!). He has a long awaited jobs one-liner: the U3 unemployment rate fell to 7.8%. He probably won’t mention that U6 unemployment, the more indicative measure of true unemployment, remained at 14.7%. This is due to a large increase in the number of workers working part time for economic reasons. The number of part-time workers rose by 582,000 according to the Household Survey.

Change in nonfarm payrolls rose by 114,000, according to the Establishment Survey. Hardly comforting given the 12,088,000 unemployed. And remember that the survey of households uncovered an additional 800,000+ jobs last month, 187,000 of which were government workers. [This reminds me of the miraculous appearance of boxes of ballots during a close election].

The number of non-institutional population going on disability has increased dramatically, as has the number of households on the SNAP (food stamp) program. In fact, the number of people going on disability since July 2010 has been larger than the decline in unemployment by near a quarter of a million! Read more >>

Youth Joblessness: No End in Sight, Says Report

An analysis by the nonprofit, nonpartisan group YoungInvincibles asks what kind of employment prospects young Americans can look forward to over the next decade. Its conclusion: Bleak.

The report, “No End in Sight? The Long-Term Youth Jobs Gap and What It Means for America,” says that though the present looks bad for young job-seekers, the future could be worse. Further, it questions whether employment for the young will ever return to what it was before the recession. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2010 expressed a similarly gloomy view.)

Study co-author Rory O’Sullivan says that today’s unemployment numbers understate the problem. The unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds now stands at 16.5 percent, more than double the rate for the population at large (8.2 percent). For Latino youth, the rate is 20.5 percent, and for African-American youth, 30.2 percent.  Fewer than half of all young Americans hold any kind of job at all, says the report.

These numbers, while daunting, fail to include young people who have given up looking for work and dropped out of the labor force altogether. The report identifies what it calls a “jobs gap” of some 2.7 million, meaning that there are that many fewer jobs for youth today than would have existed without the recession. Read more >>

100 Million Americans Without Jobs

The national unemployment rates gets lots of attention, and lately more attention has been paid to the workforce participation rate since more Americans have given up looking for a job, but we can also see that an astounding 100 million Americans don’t have jobs.

Specifically, these are people who are part of the civilian over-16 non-institutional population who are either unemployed or not part of the workforce. According to the April jobs report, the number of jobless American stood at 100.9 million.

That’s an all-time record and it’s an increase of 26.2 million over the last 12 years. It’s as if we absorbed the entire adult population of Canada and not a single person had a job. More>>

100 Million Working Age Americans Do Not Have Jobs

2009 unemployment numbers

The unemployment crisis in America is much worse than you are being told.  Did you know that there are 100 million working age Americans that do not get up in the morning and go to work?  No wonder why it seems like there are so many people that do not have jobs! 

According to the federal government, there are 12.6 million working age Americans that are considered to be "officially" unemployed, but there are another 87.8 million working age Americans that are not working either.  The federal government considers those Americans to be "not in the labor force" so they are not included in the unemployment rate.  In fact, this is one of the key ways that the government manipulates the unemployment numbers. 

The Obama administration would have us believe that the unemployment rate is going down and that since the start of the last recession about as many Americans have left the labor force as we saw during the entire decades of the 1980s and 1990s combined. The truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is just about the same right now as it was two years ago. More...

The 86 Million Invisible Unemployed

There are far more jobless people in the United States than you might think. While it's true that the unemployment rate is falling, that doesn't include the millions of nonworking adults who aren't even looking for a job anymore. And hiring isn't strong enough to keep up with population growth.

As a result, the labor force is now at its smallest size since the 1980s when compared to the broader working age population. A person is counted as part of the labor force if they have a job or have looked for one in the last four weeks. Only about 64% of Americans over the age of 16 currently fall into that category, according to the Labor Department. That's the lowest labor force participation rate since 1984.

It's a worrisome sign for the economy and partly explains why the unemployment rate has been falling recently. Only people looking for work are considered officially unemployed. Last year there were 86 million people who didn't have a job and weren't consistently looking for one, according to Labor Department data. More...

US Needs To Generate 263,700 Jobs Monthly To Return To Pre-Depression Employment By End Of Obama Second Term

Zero Hedge
We will simply copy and paste, with the appropriate adjustments, the form text we put up after each and every NFP report calculating the number of people that have to be added by the end of a hypothetical second Obama term. Using the November boilerplate: "Every few months we rerun an analysis of how many jobs the US economy has to generate to return to the unemployment rate as of December 2007 when the Great Financial Crisis started, by the end of Obama's potential second term in November 2016.

This calculation takes into account the historical change in Payroll and includes the 90,000/month natural growth to the labor force, and extrapolates into the future. And every time we rerun this calculation, the number of jobs that has to be created to get back to baseline increases: First it was 245,500 in April, then 250,000 in June, then 254,000 in July then 261,200 in October [and finally 262,500 in November].

this number has has just risen to an all time high of 263,700. This means that unless that number of jobs is created each month for the next 5 years, America will have a higher unemployment rate in October 2016 than it did in December 2007. More...

Here's what savvy thinkers know about the true unemployment numbers

Via fiatsfire.blogspot.com

-They know that if the official U3 unemployment number that was released with this "release" is up to 9% and the official U6 unemployment is up to 15.9%, then the real unemployment rate which includes those who want a job, those who have fallen off the unemployment payrolls and are no longer counted as unemployed, is more than 23%. 

-They know that the labor force participation rate is at the lowest rate in 25 years.

-They know the number of people not in the labor force AND the number of people that want a job are both a all time records.

-They know that full time jobs are a thing of the past in this country and nearly all new jobs are part time (read: minimum wage Burger King, WalMart et al jobs) which means, don't expect a housing recovery from those people. Take for example McDonalds hiring 62k people of that big number!

US jobs report points to protracted downturn

Andre Damon
The Labor Department said Friday that the US unemployment rate rose in April, but that the economy added more jobs than had previously been expected. Behind the increase in jobs, however, is a dismal and in many ways worsening employment situation, combined with a systematic attack on wages and social programs.

The unemployment rate grew to 9 percent, up from 8.8 percent in March. The number of employees reported by businesses increased to 244,000, higher than the 185,000 that economists expected. This is still barely enough to keep up with the growth in the labor market.

The Labor Department bases its estimate of the unemployment rate on a survey of households, while the payroll figure comes from a survey of businesses. Because of this, the two do not always move together.

The 244,000 jobs created in April represent only a small portion of the jobs that were destroyed during the downturn. Since February 2010, the US economy has created 1.8 million jobs. But this figure pales in comparison with the 8.7 million jobs that were lost since the start of the recession.

Some commentators were quick to dismiss the rise in the unemployment rate as a sign that discouraged workers were once again reentering the labor force, but there is little in the report to suggest that this is the case.

The labor force participation rate held steady last month at 64.2 percent for the fourth consecutive month, down from 66 percent in 2006. The number of people out of work likewise stayed the same at 13.7 million. The U-6 unemployment rate, which includes "discouraged workers" and people working part-time for economic reasons, grew to 15.9 percent, from 15.7 percent the month before.

For some sections of the population, unemployment is rampant. One in four teenagers looking for work cannot find it, along with 16.1 percent of African-Americans and 11.8 percent of Hispanics.

The report follows a string of dismal economic news. The Commerce Department said late last month that the US economy grew by 1.8 percent in the first quarter of 2011, significantly less than the 3.4 percent growth in the fourth quarter of last year and 4.5 percent in the third quarter of last year.

Weekly initial jobless claims likewise continued to edge up. After dipping as low as 375,000 in late February, the figure shot up to 474,000 last week. This was the fourth consecutive week in which initial claims were over 400,000, generally considered a indicator of net job losses.

The housing market, meanwhile, has continued to worsen. The S&P/Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 major cities fell by 1.1 percent in February, the latest month for which information is available, according to figures released April 26. Nationwide, home values are down by 3.3 percent over the past year. Since the beginning of the housing market downturn in 2006, over $9 trillion has been wiped out from home values. More...

Percentage of Americans in labor force is the lowest since 1983

theburningplatform.com

Barack Obama and his minions were out in force on Friday declaring that the 216,000 jobs added in February are proof of a recovering economy. The unemployment rate fell to 8.8%, down from 9.8% in April 2010. All it took was 2.8 million Americans to leave the labor force to achieve this fabulous reduction in the unemployment rate. The percentage of Americans in the labor force of 64.2% is the lowest since 1983. The employment to population ratio of 58.5% is also the lowest since 1983. These atrocious figures are after a supposed economic recovery that has been underway for the last 18 months.

There are now 1.8 million more people employed than at the depths of this Greater Depression. The working age population has grown by 3.2 million people since 2009. Inexplicably, the civilian workforce has actually declined by 736,000 over this same time frame. The government drones at the BLS want us to believe these people voluntarily left the workforce. Obama apologists declare this is because Baby Boomers are leaving the workforce as they retire into the sunset. That is laughable, as all studies show Boomers have not saved enough to retire and will be forced to work into their 70′s.

The manipulation of data in order to spin the economic situation in this country in the best light possible has become so blatant that only the most ignorant could possibly believe it. The corporate mainstream media dutifully reports the propaganda, without ever critically assessing what is being distributed by the government. The percentage of the American working population in the workforce consistently ranged between 66% and 67% from 1998 through 2008. Then, suddenly in 2008, after the economy went in the tank, a couple million Americans found better things to do with their spare time and left the workforce. Anyone with an ounce of brains knows these people gave up and are really unemployed. The percentage of people in the labor force should be 66.5%. Using this 20 year average would add 5.5 million people to the civilian labor force and the unemployment rolls. This exercise in reality gives a real unemployment rate of 12%.

It is interesting that Obama and his top economic propagandist Austin Goolsbee were out in full force on Friday, taking credit for the “tremendous” job gains, but had nothing to say earlier in the week with a much more revealing government report. There is now an all-time high of 44.2 million Americans and 20.7 million households in the food stamp program. This is 14.3% of the American population and 18% of all the households. More...

US Needs To Generate 246,600 Jobs A Month To Get To Pre-Depression Employment By End Of Obama Second Term

The first time we did an analysis of how many jobs per month the US has to generate each month to get back to the same payroll number as of November 2007, right before the start of the Greater Depression, and when accounting for the 90K/month natural growth to the labor force, something the administration continues to blissfully ignore (with the labor participation rate plunging to a 26 year low) it was in the mid 220s. As of today, the number is almost quarter of a million, or 246,600. That is how many jobs the US has to generate every single month until November 2016, or the end of Obama's improbable second turn, for the unemployment rate to get back to where it was when accounting for population growth. Read More...

Fewest Teen Jobs added in June since 1951

calculatedriskblog.com
According to the BLS, only 497,000 teens (ages 16 to 19) found jobs in June 2010 NSA (June is the key months for summer employment). This is the fewest teen jobs added in June since 1951.

Click on graph for larger image in new window.

This graph shows the number of teens looking for work (lowest since 1954) and the number of teens found jobs in June (data is not seasonally adjusted).

This partially explains the large drop in participation rate in June - an extremely low number of teenagers joined the workforce, and this resulted in 256,000 teens leaving the workforce on a seasonally adjusted basis - of the total 652,000 total people leaving the workforce (seasonally adjusted).

Teens not looking for jobs - because the job market is so bad - actually helped push down the unemployment rate!

Fake +290K Payrolls "Added", Real Number Is 36K

290K of which census was 66k and Birth Death was 188k. Hurray -the economy added a real 36k in jobs in April. Still, we are curious how the Chairman will not be forced to discuss tightening after this B/D adjustment inspired number (188K in April B/D, 81K in March). And in the meantime, headlines will read Unemployment back to 9.9%, and Underemployment back to 17.1%. Record jittery market bounces than calms down again. More...

17.9 Percent Real Unemployment

Image via Wikipedia

17.9 Percent Real Unemployment - How Solid is the Recovery?
Simon Maierhofer
The unemployment picture painted by today’s jobs report headlines is much rosier than reality. Still, they were enough to provide a serious pop for stocks. What are the real numbers and will reality seriously ding the market?

How do fish get caught? They open their mouth. How do investors get ensnared or misled? They believe in non-existent phenomenon like a “jobless recovery.”

Surprising as it is, for nearly a year, investors have shrugged off mounting jobless claims and rising unemployment as an ingredient that is not really required for an economic recovery.

In reality, real unemployment is at 17.9%, 0.1% short of last month’s all-time high. Yes, 17.9%! This is the official number reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The BLS publishes different sets of data on a regular basis. The main focus tends to be on the U-3 unemployment rate (currently 9.7%, seasonally adjusted).

U-3 is the “official” unemployment rate and illustrates total unemployed persons as a percentage of the civilian labor force. Another category – U-4 – includes unemployed workers plus discouraged workers. A discouraged worker is someone who’s available to work but has stopped actively seeking for work.

U-5 unemployment includes the number of unemployed workers, plus discouraged workers, plus marginally attached workers. A marginally attached worker is someone who is able and willing to work but is not actively seeking work.

U-6 is as close to the real unemployment figure as government reporting gets. This number includes unemployed workers, plus discouraged workers, plus marginally attached workers, plus workers that are forced to work part-time because they are not able to find a full-time job.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of U-6 unemployed workers is 17.9% (not seasonally adjusted – 16.8%, an all-time high). More...

The continuing theater of BLS absurdities

Mish
In the continuing theater of BLS absurdities, the unemployment rate fell to 9.7% in spite of a 25th consecutive month of job losses. Some stopped counting at 22 months in November. However, I find November questionable.

This month professional services contributed 44,00 jobs to the plus side, but 52,000 of them were part-time jobs. Amazingly a table below shows the number of part-time workers decreased by 849,000 from last month. Go figure.

Moreover, the so-called 64,000 rise in November can be attributed to the seasonally adjusted hiring of 94,000 temporary workers. Here is a look at revisions ....

BLS Revisions



Household Revisions

The above table does not affect the unemployment rate. Revisions to the Household Survey do. Here are the household revisions.



Bingo. Just like that the population shrank as did the civilian labor force.

For some reason the BLS does this in pieces. The following chart shows the result.



There are now a whopping 2.5 million people without a job but want one, yet are not counted as unemployed.

So yes, the "official unemployment rate" can hold its own or even drop with this kind of nonsense.

Now for a closer look at the report ....

This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the January 2010 Employment Report.

The unemployment rate fell from 10.0 to 9.7 percent in January, and nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-20,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment fell in construction and in transportation and warehousing, while temporary help services and retail trade added jobs..




Establishment Data



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Highlights

• 20,000 jobs were lost in total vs. 150,000 jobs last month.
• 75,000 construction jobs were lost vs. 32,000 last month.
• 11,000 manufacturing jobs were added vs. 23,000 lost last month.
• 48,000 service providing jobs were added vs. 69,000 lost last month.
• 42,000 retail trade jobs were added vs. 18,000 lost last month.
• 44,000 professional and business services jobs were added vs. 20,000 last month.
• 16,000 education and health services jobs were added vs. 26,000 last month.
• 14,000 leisure and hospitality jobs were lost vs. 41,000 last month.
• 8,000 government jobs were lost vs. 27,000 last month.
• 52,000 temporary help jobs were added vs 58,000 last month and a whopping 94,000 in November.
  

Look at that last line again.

November added 94,000 temporary jobs seasonally adjusted. Even if true it is hardly anything to crow about but it does explain the positive job growth in November.

A total of 60,000 goods producing jobs were lost (higher paying jobs). Professional services contributed 44,00 jobs to the plus side, but 52,000 of them were part-time jobs! Amazingly a table below shows the number of part-time workers decreased by 849,000 from last month.

Note: some of the above categories overlap as shown in the preceding chart, so do not attempt to total them up.

Index of Aggregate Weekly Hours

Work hours were up one tick to 33.3. Short work weeks contribute to household problems. Moreover, before hiring begins at many places, work weeks will increase.

Birth Death Model Revisions 2009



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Birth Death Model Revisions 2009



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Birth/Death Model Revisions

There are so many revisions and the BLS Birth/Death Model methodology so screwed up it is pointless to further comment other than to repeat a few general statements.

Please note that one cannot subtract or add birth death revisions to the reported totals and get a meaningful answer. One set of numbers is seasonally adjusted the other is not. In the black box the BLS combines the two coming out with a total. The Birth Death numbers influence the overall totals but the math is not as simple as it appears and the effect is nowhere near as big as it might logically appear at first glance.

BLS Black Box

For those unfamiliar with the birth/death model, monthly jobs adjustments are made by the BLS based on economic assumptions about the birth and death of businesses (not individuals). Those assumptions are made according to estimates of where the BLS thinks we are in the economic cycle.

The BLS has admitted however, that their model will be wrong at economic turning points. And there is no doubt we are long past an economic turning point.

Here is the pertinent snip from the BLS on Birth/Death Methodology.

• The net birth/death model component figures are unique to each month and exhibit a seasonal pattern that can result in negative adjustments in some months. These models do not attempt to correct for any other potential error sources in the CES estimates such as sampling error or design limitations.
• Note that the net birth/death figures are not seasonally adjusted, and are applied to not seasonally adjusted monthly employment links to determine the final estimate.
• The most significant potential drawback to this or any model-based approach is that time series modeling assumes a predictable continuation of historical patterns and relationships and therefore is likely to have some difficulty producing reliable estimates at economic turning points or during periods when there are sudden changes in trend.

Household Data

In January, the number of unemployed persons decreased to 14.8 million, and the unemployment rate fell by 0.3 percentage point to 9.7 percent.

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) continued to trend up in January, reaching 6.3 million. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of longterm unemployed has risen by 5.0 million.

In January, the civilian labor force participation rate was little changed at 64.7 percent. The employment-population ratio rose from 58.2 to 58.4 percent.

The number of persons who worked part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) fell from 9.2 to 8.3 million in January. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

Persons Not in the Labor Force

About 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in January, an increase of 409,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

Among the marginally attached, there were 1.1 million discouraged workers in January, up from 734,000 a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.5 million people marginally attached to the labor force had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities.

Table A-8 Part Time Status

Note: many table numbers have changed. Last month and for as long as I remember, this used to be Table A-5.



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The chart shows there are 8.3 million people are working part time but want a full time job. A year ago the number was 8.8 million. More importantly, last month it was 9.2 million. Specifically, 849,000 part-time workers now have full-time status (or lost their job altogether).

In general a decreasing number of part-time workers is a good thing. It remains to be seen if this is an outlier or the start of a trend.

Regardless, there are still millions of workers whose hours will rise before companies start hiring more workers.

Table A-15

Table A-15 is where one can find a better approximation of what the unemployment rate really is. Note: many table numbers have changed. Last month and for as long as I remember, this used to be Table A-12.



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Grim Statistics

The official unemployment rate is 9.7%. However, if you start counting all the people that want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is. That number is in the last row labeled U-6.

It reflects how unemployment feels to the average Joe on the street. U-6 is 16.5%. Both U-6 and U-3 (the so called "official" unemployment number) are poised to rise further although most likely at a slower pace than earlier this year.

Looking ahead, there is no driver for jobs and states in forced cutback mode are making matters far worse.

America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.

Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.

The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy –– just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens.

Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody's Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

Judges are finding ways to block evictions. One magistrate in Minnesota halted a case calling the creditor "harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive". We are not far from a de facto moratorium in some areas.

This is how it ended between 1932 and 1934, when half the US states declared moratoria or "Farm Holidays". Such flexibility innoculated America's democracy against the appeal of Red Unions and Coughlin Fascists. The home siezures are occurring despite frantic efforts by the Obama administration to delay the process.

This policy is entirely justified given the scale of the social crisis. But it also masks the continued rot in the housing market, allows lenders to hide losses, and stores up an ever larger overhang of unsold properties. It takes heroic naivety to think the US housing market has turned the corner (apologies to Goldman Sachs, as always). The fuse has yet to detonate on the next mortgage bomb, $134bn (£83bn) of "option ARM" contracts due to reset violently upwards this year and next.

US house prices have eked out five months of gains on the Case-Shiller index, but momentum stalled in October in half the cities even before the latest surge of 40 basis points in mortgage rates. Karl Case (of the index) says prices may sink another 15pc. "If the 2008 and 2009 loans go bad, then we're back where we were before – in a nightmare."

David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said it is remarkable how little traction has been achieved by zero rates and the greatest fiscal blitz of all time. The US economy grew at a 2.2pc rate in the third quarter (entirely due to Obama stimulus). This compares to an average of 7.3pc in the first quarter of every recovery since the Second World War.

Fed hawks are playing with fire by talking up about exit strategies, not for the first time. This is what they did in June 2008. We know what happened three months later. For the record, manufacturing capacity use at 67.2pc, and "auto-buying intentions" are the lowest ever.

The Fed's own Monetary Multiplier crashed to an all-time low of 0.809 in mid-December. Commercial paper has shrunk by $280bn ($175bn) in since October. Bank credit has been racing down a hair-raising black run since June. It has dropped from $10.844 trillion to $9.013 trillion since November 25. The MZM money supply is contracting at a 3pc annual rate. Broad M3 money is contracting at over 5pc.

Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said the Fed is baking deflation into the pie later this year, and perhaps a double-dip recession. Europe is even worse.

This has not stopped an army of commentators is trying to bounce the Fed into early rate rises. They accuse Ben Bernanke of repeating the error of 2004 when the Fed waited too long. Sometimes you just want to scream. In 2004 there was no housing collapse, unemployment was 5.5pc, banks were in rude good health, and the Fed Multiplier was 1.73.

How anybody can see imminent inflation in the dying embers of core PCE, just 0.1pc in November, is beyond me.

Mr Rosenberg is asked by clients why Wall Street does not seem to agree with his grim analysis.

His answer is that this is the same Mr Market that bought stocks in October 1987 when they were 25pc overvalued on Shiller "10-year normalized earnings basis" – exactly as they are today – and bought them at even more overvalued prices in 2007, long after the property crash had begun, Bear Stearns funds had imploded, and credit had its August heart attack. The stock market has become a lagging indicator. Tear up the textbooks.