QE's Special Sauce
"There's no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie."I hear all the time that 'unemployment is greatly reduced, but the people aren't feeling it.' When the media, talking heads, the White House and Wall Street start reporting the truth – the percentage of Americans in good jobs; jobs that are full time and real – then we will quit wondering why Americans aren't 'feeling' something that doesn't remotely reflect the reality in their lives. And we will also quit wondering what hollowed out the middle class."Based on demographic trends, I suggest the real unemployment rate after weeding out disability fraud, forced retirement, kids hiding out in school for lack of a job, and those who are not counted as unemployed simply because they gave up looking is more like 9% than 7%."
"At the end of 2013, there were still 2 million fewer manufacturing jobs and 15,000 fewer manufacturing establishments than in 2007, the year before the Great Recession, and inflation-adjusted manufacturing output (value-added) was still 3.2% below 2007 levels."Although the US manufacturing sector has grown since 2010, resulting in 520,000 new jobs and 2.4% real value-added growth, almost all of this growth has been cyclical in nature, driven by just a few industries that contracted sharply during the recession."