by David Stockman •
As we indicated in Part 2, the Fed’s crusade to pump-up inflation toward its 2.00% target by hammering-down interest rates to the so-called zero bound is economically lethal. The former destroys the purchasing power of main street wages while the latter strip mines capital from business and channels it into Wall Street financial engineering and the inflation of stock prices.
In the case of America’s 80 million working age adults (25 or over) with a high school education or less, the Fed’s double whammy has been catastrophic. As we demonstrated yesterday, the employment-to-population ratio for this group has plummeted from 60% prior to the great recession to about 54% today.
In round terms this means that the number of job holders in that pool of the less educated has shrunk from 49.4 million to 43.5 million since early 2007.That’s nearly 6 million workers gone missing or 12% of the total from just nine years ago.
And as we documented yesterday this plunge is not due to aging demographics. The MSM meme that it’s all about the baby boomers hanging up their spikes doesn’t wash; the labor force participation rate of persons over 65 has actually increased sharply in recent years.
No comments:
Post a Comment