December 2014 Unemployment Was Actually 23% (Audio)
In his latest podcast, Peter Schiff dissects the jobs numbers from December, Obama’s new community college plan, and Charles Evans’ call for more inflation. Peter continues to be one of the few reporting on the reality underlying the headline jobs numbers, though Paul Craig Roberts just published an enlightening article at LewRockwell.com. Roberts looks at the Shadow Stats employment data for December and reveals that real unemployment is more like 23% – not 5.6% as reported by the government.
Highlights from Peter’s podcast:
“The headlines are ‘Jobs Up, Unemployment Down, Everything Is Great.’ Again, not so fast, because you can’t just look at the headlines when it comes to the jobs numbers. First, in the official numbers, there was one disappointing number, and that was average hourly earnings. Last month, they were up 0.4, which was a big jump. They were expected another 0.2 this month. Instead, December was minus 0.2. Minus. Not plus. That was the biggest drop in 8 years in average hourly earnings. And they went down to that plus 0.4 from November, and they revised that down. They cut it in half…
“The real bad news was the labor force participation rate that continues to sink, hitting a new low. We had been at 62.8, now we’re at 62.7. That’s the lowest in 38 years. You have to go back to 1977, when women were entering the labor force in droves to find a year where labor force participation was as low as it is right now. What’s really a problem with the labor force participation rate that no one talks about is that for older Americans, labor force participation is actually on the rise. [For] over 55, it’s not falling… The real collapse in the labor force participation is among younger people. That’s why when you have people, even Janet Yellen, dismissing this as, ‘Well, it’s demographics. It’s the baby boomers retiring.’ They’re not retiring! They want to, [but] that’s the problem. They can’t afford to. The young people… they can’t get jobs. So the number is actually worse than it seems…
“The household survey showed that 450,000 people left the labor force in December, while only 110,000 people actually got jobs… As far as that survey is concerned, for every one person who entered the labor force, four people left. Lousy, lousy number…
“In December, 43,600 people got jobs waiting table and tending bar. That’s the highest number added in that segment since 2012. Chances are a lot of these waiters and waitresses are working part-time. A lot of them could be in their 60s. And I bet most of them have college degrees…
“Gold continued to trade very well throughout the week. It finished on another positive note. I think we’re above $1220 in US dollars. Gold stocks very strong on the day, on the week, leading the markets thus far in 2015. In fact, one of the only sectors that’s actually positive on the year… Gold continued to rise against other currencies. Huge moves up… Gold continues to rise, and I think this will continue to generate interest in the precious metals around the world… The fact that gold was strong even in a rising dollar environment, to me indicates a lot of strength. To me, it indicates that when the dollar resumes its downward trend, gold’s upward trend is going to be supercharged, once it’s no longer swimming against the tide…”
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