Jobs Depression Year 6: More Americans Worse Off Financially

Gallup reports that, in the last year, more Americans have become worse off financially than better off. This revelation--five and a half years after the fall of Lehman--is just the latest evidence that our jobs depression continues. (Article continues after chart.)

For years, I've been calling this period of American history a jobs depression. Before calling me a Chicken Little for using the "D" word, please keep in mind that, while there's no official definition for "depression" in an economic sense, most economists call protracted periods of economic malaise "depressions".

And the last 6 years have absolutely been a protracted period of economic malaise.

Years after the economy bottomed in 2009, the epidemic of long-term unemployment and underemployment continues to afflict the American workforce. Incredibly, 5 years into "recovery", fewer jobs were created last year than the year before. And, as has been the case throughout this depression, the vast majority of jobs created last year were menial in nature. Very few new "breadwinner" jobs.

Keep in mind that the unacceptably tepid jobs recovery that we have had has been merely a result of the inflation of the Fed's latest asset bubble. The Fed's balance sheet just passed $4 trillion...that's 22% of the entire economy! The Fed has been feigning healthy economic growth for years by inflating what Nouriel Roubini is calling the "mother of all bubbles".

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

No Recovery For "Breadwinner" Jobs

Former Reagan budget director David Stockman has been quite outspoken about the Federal Reserve's role in collapsing the economy. Much of his new book, The Great Deformation, explains how the Fed led us into this economic depression and how our central bank is now inflating an asset bubble that will eclipse the mid-2000s housing bubble. This new, larger bubble, Stockman says, will eventually burst and crash the economy once more.
 
In The Great Deformation, Stockman frequently notes that the post-Great Recession "recovery" has been nothing but rampant Fed-fueled asset speculation. In Chapter 31, the former budget director explains that, while the speculation has been a windfall for the wealthiest among us, it's done next to nothing to improve the atrocious job market:

After the US economy liquidated excess inventory and labor and hit its natural bottom in June 2009, it embarked upon a halting but wholly unnatural “recovery.” The artificial prolongation of the Bush tax cuts, the 2 percent payroll tax abatement and the spend-out of the Obama stimulus pilfered several trillions from future taxpayers in order to gift America’s present day “consumption units” with the wherewithal to buy more shoes and soda pop.

But there has been no recovery of the Main Street economy where it counts; that is, no revival of breadwinner jobs and earned incomes on the free market.

What we have once again is faux prosperity. In fact, the current Bernanke Bubble is an even sketchier version of the last one and consists essentially of the deliberate and relentless reflation of financial asset prices.

In practice, this amounts to a monetary version of “trickle down” economics. By September 2012, personal consumption expenditure (PCE) was up by $1.2 trillion from the prior peak, representing a modest 2.2 percent per year (0.6 percent after inflation) gain from the level of late 2007. Yet half of this gain—more than $600 billion—reflected the massive growth of government transfer payments, and much of the rebound which did occur in private consumption spending was concentrated in the top 10–20 percent of households. In short, the Fed’s financial repression policies enabled Uncle Sam to fund transfer payments for the bottom rungs of society at virtually no carry cost on the debt, while they juiced the top rungs with a wealth effects tonic that boosted spending at Nordstrom’s and Coach.

The Fed’s post-Lehman money printing spree has thus failed to revive Main Street, but it has ignited yet another round of rampant speculation in the risk asset classes. Accordingly, the net worth of the 1 percent is temporarily back to the pre-crisis status quo ante.

Conservatives often scoff at the phrase "1 percent". But it's absolutely true that Fed liquidity pumping has been great for the wealthiest Americans but bad for the rest of us. The reason is simple: 1) inflation--a natural byproduct of liquidity pumping--is good for most investment classes but bad for nearly every other sector of the economy, and 2) the wealthiest among us have the majority of their net worth in investments that benefit most from inflation: equities, commodities, and real estate.

Needless to say, successful speculation in the fast money complex is not a sign of honest economic recovery: it merely marks the prelude to another spectacular meltdown in the canyons of Wall Street next time the music stops.

In the following subsection, Stockman details the sunset of American "breadwinner" jobs:

The precarious foundation of the Bernanke Bubble is starkly evident in the internal composition of the jobs numbers. At the time the US economy peaked in December 2007, there were 71.8 million “breadwinner” jobs in construction, manufacturing, white-collar professions, government, and full-time private services. These jobs accounted for more than half of the nation’s 138 million total payroll and on average paid about $50,000 per year—just enough to support a family.

Breadwinner jobs also generated more than 65 percent of earned wage and salary income and are thus the foundation of the Main Street economy. Yet after a brutal 5.6 million loss of breadwinner jobs during the Great Recession, a startling fact stands out: less than 4 percent of that loss had been recovered after 40 months of so-called recovery.

The 3 million jobs recovered since the recession ended in June 2009, in fact, have been entirely concentrated in the two far more marginal categories that comprise the balance of the national payroll. More than half of the recovery (1.6 million jobs) occurred in what is essentially the “part-time economy.” It presently includes 36.4 million jobs in retail, hotels, restaurants, shoe-shine stands, and temporary help agencies where average annualized compensation was only $19,000. This vast swath of the jobs economy—27 percent of the total—is thus comprised of entry level, second earner, and episodic jobs that enable their holders to barely scrape by.

The April jobs report exemplifies the dearth of good jobs. While April is historically the strongest month for hiring, this April saw a woefully insufficient number of jobs created, more than half of the new jobs in either the hospitality industry (think: bartenders, waitresses, etc.) or temp jobs. Again, that was in the strongest month for hiring 5 years after Lehman.

The balance of the pick-up (1.1 million jobs) was in the HES Complex, which consists of 30.7 million jobs in health, education, and social services. Average compensation is slightly better at about $35,000 annually and this category has grown steadily for years. Its increasingly salient disability, however, is that it is almost entirely dependent on government spending and tax subsidies, and thus faces the headwind of the nation’s growing fiscal insolvency.

When viewed in this three category framework, the nation’s job picture reveals a lopsided aspect that thoroughly belies the headline claims of recovery. A healthy Main Street economy self-evidently depends upon growth in breadwinner jobs, but there has been none, even during the bubble years before the financial crisis. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported 71.8 million breadwinner jobs in January 2000, yet seven years later in December 2007—after the huge boom in housing, real estate, household consumption, and the stock market—the number was still exactly 71.8 million.

Stockman is saying what I've been saying all along: the economy hasn't been "right" since the Fed's tech bubble burst in the early 2000s. He's saying that all we've seen in the new millennium has been cycles of artificial booms and busts built on shaky fundamentals that have never allowed a full recovery of the job market. Stockman elaborates on the shaky fundamentals in the concluding paragraphs of the subsection:

The faux prosperity of the Fed’s bubble finance is thus starkly evident. This is the single most important metric of Main Street economic health, and not only had there been zero new breadwinner jobs on a peak-to-peak basis, but that alarming fact had been completely ignored by the smugly confident monetary politburo.

Alas, the latter was blithely tracking a feedback loop of its own making. Flooding Wall Street with easy money, it saw the stock averages soar and pronounced itself pleased with the resulting “wealth effects.” Turning the nation’s homes into debt-dispensing ATMs, it witnessed a household consumption spree and marveled that the “incoming” macroeconomic data was better than expected. That these deformations were mistaken for prosperity and sustainable economic growth gives witness to the everlasting folly of the monetary doctrines now in vogue in the Eccles Building.

To be sure, nominal GDP did grow by 40 percent, or about $4 trillion, between 2000 and 2007. Yet there should be no mystery as to how it happened. As has been noted, total debt outstanding grew by $20 trillion during that same period. The American economy was thus being pushed forward by a bow wave of debt, not pulled higher by rising productivity and earned income.

Indeed, the modest gain of 7.5 million jobs during those seven years reflected exactly this debt-driven dynamic and explains why none of these job gains were in the breadwinner categories. Instead, about 2.5 million were accounted for by the part-time economy jobs described above. On an income-equivalent basis these were actually “40 percent jobs” because they represented an average of twenty-five hours per week and paid $14 per hour, compared to a standard forty-hour work week and a national average wage rate of $22 per hour. Thus, spending their trillions of MEW windfalls at malls, bars, restaurants, vacation spots, and athletic clubs, homeowners and the prosperous classes, in effect, temporarily hired the renters and the increasing legions of marginal workers left behind.

Likewise, another 5 million jobs were generated in the HES (health, education, and social services) complex. Here the job count grew by 20 percent, but it was mainly due to the fact that the sector’s paymasters - government budgets and tax-preferred employer health plans - were temporarily flush.

However, these, too, were “debt-push” jobs that paid modest wages. While the steady 2.6 percent annual growth of HES jobs during the second Greenspan Bubble did flatter the monthly employment “print,” it was possible only so long as government and health plans could keep spending at rates far higher than the growth rate of the national economy.

Fed-fueled rampant asset speculation inflated the housing bubble, which burst and crashed the economy, making the prospect of securing a "breadwinner" job but a dream for many intelligent, educated, perfectly employable Americans. Now, the Fed is enabling what notable economist Nouriel Roubini is calling the "mother of all bubbles".

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

Economy Creating Lost Generation

I don't seek out bad economic data; bad economic data find me. I gather data from numerous reputable sources, and, sometimes, reputable sources send them to me. One of these reputable sources is John Lounsbury, Founding Partner and Managing Editor at Econintersect LLC. This morning, John sent me the following article about the lost generation that the current economic depression has been creating:

The inordinate growth of student loans – and its effect on the economy – is killing consumption (autos) and the housing sector.  This is no short term dynamic, but will effect the economy for decades.

The USA is a consumer driven economy.  A study released this week authored by Meta Brown and Sydnee Caldwell stated:

As a result of tighter underwriting standards, higher delinquency rates, and lower credit scores, consumers with educational debt may have more limited access to housing and auto debt and, as a result, more limited options in the housing and vehicle markets, despite their comparatively high earning potential.

Both these factors—lowered expectations of future earnings and more limited access to credit—may have broad implications for the ongoing recovery of the housing and vehicle markets, and of U.S. consumer spending more generally. While highly skilled young workers have traditionally provided a vital influx of new, affluent consumers to U.S. housing and auto markets, unprecedented student debt may dampen their influence in today’s marketplace.

Some believe the lack of jobs is causing a higher than normal attendance in schools – but historical data from the BLS shows attendance appears moderating.

And there seems little correlation between the ability of the young to get jobs and enrollment in colleges / universities.

The student loan growth phenomenon seems to be directly related to cost inflation of education outstripping the general rate of inflation by significant multiples.  The following table is from a study by Jordan Bowersox and Jonathan Breazeale.

Yearly Cost of Colleges / Universities

This study appears to correlate well with the associated BLS education cost index.

It is interesting to this author that economists talk about the economic drag by the baby boomers on the economy, but yet ignore the built in drag of higher education on the economy.  The young are historically higher consumers than the old – yet the cost of education is weakening the ability of the young to consume.

It's important to note that ever-expensive higher education not leading to good-paying jobs not only prevents younger people from contributing to the economy as consumers; it impedes their ability to achieve life milestones that contribute to the economy: getting married, having children, etc.

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

America's Economic Depression In 5 Charts

This is not what economic recovery looks like. This is, however, what an economic depression looks like:

First, the American workforce is far smaller than it was before the 2008 economic collapse, even though the number of Americans of working age has increased by several million:

 Second, the people who are lucky enough to be gainfully employed are earning less, adjusted for inflation:

Third, with far fewer people employed, those who are employed earning less, and the long-term unemployed and underemployed depleting their savings, the number of Americans living in poverty continues to grow:

Fourth, with the employed earning less, millions of unemployed and underemployed depleting their savings, and interest rates at record lows, Americans are saving less:

Finally, the number of Americans dependent on the government for basic survival has grown by tens of millions:

Only 2 words adequately describe the past 5 years: economic depression. 

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

America Remains In A Jobs Depression

In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, business mogul Mort Zuckerman recently penned an editorial that argues that the United States remains in the depths of a protracted "jobs depression" that's far worse than the mainstream media reports:

Jobs! President Obama has set a record. In his speech to Congress on Tuesday, he uttered the word "jobs" more than in any of his previous four State of the Union addresses. His 45 mentions were more than double the references to any of the other policy ambitions encapsulated in his speech by such words as health, education, immigration, guns, deficit, debt, energy, climate, economy, Afghanistan, wage, spend or tax (the runner-up).
If only the president's record on unemployment were as good.

After four years America remains in a jobs depression as great as the Great Depression. 

Notice that Zuckerman said "as great as the Great Depression". Comparisons of this economic depression to the Great Depression are apt.

But the crisis isn't seen in that light because the country isn't confronted daily by scenes of despair like the 1930s photographs of bread lines and soup kitchens and thousands of men (very few women then) waiting all day outside a factory in a forlorn quest for work.
But the jobless are still in the millions across the land, little changed in their total since the 1930s: 12.3 million today officially fully unemployed compared with 12.8 million in 1933 at the depth of the Depression.

Yes, the U.S. population is much larger now, but 12 million out of work still means 12 million lives devastated. And that number masks the true vastness of the modern disaster.

The jobless today are much less visible than they were in the 1930s because relief is organized differently. Today in the "recovery," the millions are being assisted, out of sight, by government checks, unemployment checks, Social Security disability checks and food stamps.

He's correct: Entitlements are the new soup lines. Not seeing the desperate masses doesn't mean that they don't exist.

More than 48 million Americans are in the food-stamp program—an almost incredible record. That is 15% of the total population compared with the 7.9% participation in food stamps from 1970-2000. Then there are the more than 11 million Americans who are collecting Social Security checks to compensate for disability, also a record. Half have signed on since President Obama came to office. In 1992, there was one person on disability for every 35 workers; today it is one for every 16.

Such an increase is simply impossible to connect to direct disability experienced during employment, for it is inconceivable that work in America has become so dangerous. For many, this disability program has become another form of unemployment compensation, only this time without end.

But the predicament of our times is worse than that, worse in its way than the 1930s figures might suggest. Employers are either shortening the workweek or asking employees to take unpaid leave in unprecedented numbers. Neither those on disability nor those on leave are included in the unemployment numbers.

I've repeated this line a number of times: the government and the MSM discount the fact that there's a quality component to jobs as well as a quantity component. Not only is the aggregate number of unemployed people worse than reported, but the majority of jobs created during this depression have been of the part-time, menial variety.

The U.S. labor market, which peaked in November 2007 when there were 139,143,000 jobs, now encompasses only 132,705,000 workers, a drop of 6.4 million jobs from the peak. The only work that has increased is part-time, and that is because it allows employers to reduce costs through a diminished benefit package or none at all.

The broadest measure of unemployment today is approximately 14.5%, way above the 7.9% headline number. The 14.5% reflects the unemployed and three other categories: the more than eight million people who are employed part-time for economic reasons (because their hours have been cut back or because they are unable to find a full-time job), the 10 million who have stopped looking for work, and those who are "marginally attached" to the workforce.

In its latest report, Gallup, a very reliable source, reported that the underemployment rate is north of 19%:

The labor-force participation rate has dropped to the lowest level since 1981.

It reflects discouraged workers who have dropped out of the labor force. If it were not for the dropouts, the formally announced unemployment rate would be around 9.8%, not the headline 7.9%.

Sometimes the employment numbers that are announced are simply not understood. January was supposed to have seen 157,000 jobs created. The news provoked relief and even enthusiasm in some quarters. But the supposed hiring was based on seasonally adjusted numbers—numbers adjusted to reflect regularly occurring shifts in employment, such as increased hiring of farm workers during crop harvests or retail employees after Thanksgiving. The real, unadjusted figures for January show that nearly 2.8 million jobs disappeared, which happened to be worse than the 2.63 million lost in January 2012. Even though the 157,000 jobs created were fewer than the 311,000 of January 2012, many commentators cheered because they don't understand the effects of seasonal adjustment.

So there is no solace in the statistics. Job seekers are only one-third as likely to find work as they were five years ago, and a record number of households have at least one member looking for a job, which affects everyone. And most of the newly available jobs don't match the pay, the hours or the benefits of the millions of positions that have vanished.

It typically takes 25 months to close the employment gap from the employment peak near the start of the downturn. Yet this time, more than 60 months after employment peaked in January 2006, nonfarm unemployment is still more than three million jobs below where it started.

Sobering stuff.

Eileen Appelbaum, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argues that recovery cannot become self-perpetuated until the unemployed get good jobs and resume contributing to consumer spending at their maximum potential. Unfortunately, many of the long-term unemployed aren't finding jobs; they're falling off of the radar screen.

I can't stress this enough: Those who are unfortunate enough to find themselves among the ranks of the perennially jobless typically face a lifetime of depressed earnings. (One study suggests that long-term unemployment can cut one's lifetime earning potential by as much as 20%.) The longer that the job market remains bleak (remember, it's been 5 years and counting), the more people fall into the category of long-term unemployed, whether or not the government counts them as such. In the short term, that means a drag on the economy. In the long-term, that means the creation of a new underclass.

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

U.S. Share Of World GDP Has Fallen 32% Since 2001

Mark McHugh of Across the Street outlines America's economic decline--in both real terms and relative to the rest of the world:

The Cost of Kidding Yourself

In Open Thread on Wednesday, November 28, 2012 at 1:34 pm 

Five years ago, every American would have considered a trillion-dollar budget deficit a national tragedy.  If you believe the CNBC parrot show, NOT having a trillion-dollar deficit is now a sure sign of the Apocalypse.  I speak of course of the cleverly dubbed “Fiscal Cliff,” which panicked CNBC apologists are required to mention no less than 5,000 times a day.  We’re told ad nauseam that going over the cliff will drag the US into recession.  Here’s what we’re not told: The US has been in recession 9 of the last 10 years.  It’s in recession this year, and no matter what CNBC’s financial terrorists say or the idiots on Capital Hill decide, it will most certainly be in recession in 2013.

Creating the illusion of economic growth is easy if you can print money.  It’s a prank you can play on an entire country.  Cut the value of the currency in half and the economy’s size will appear to double.  If it doesn’t, you’re in recession (whether you know it or not).   Cavemen probably understood this concept better than America’s best economic minds.

The only way to accurately measure changes in a nation’s economy is to do so relative to the world (see Notes for non-nerds below before protesting).  According to the World Bank, the U.S. represented 31.8% of the world’s economic activity in 2001. By the end of 2011, that share had dropped to 21.6%, meaning America’s slice of the world economy is 32% smaller than it was a decade ago, and getting smaller every day.  Note that America’s housing bubble did nothing to boost the U.S. on the global stage.

As horrific as these results are, they’re better than Japan’s, whose “lost decade” proved only to be prologue for its “lost-er decade.”  Japan’s share of the world economy fell more than 35% from 2001 to 2011 (literally worse than Zimbabwe) and has now shriveled 54% from its peak.  But Japan’s real collapse did not coincide with the bursting of its stock and real estate bubbles in 1990 and 1991 respectively.  The decline actually began in 1995 when policymakers allowed government debt to exceed 90% of GDP (a milestone the U.S. quietly passed in 2010). 

The more they “fixed” it, the more it broke.  17 years later, the only thing Japan has proved is that smart Japanese economists are about as real as Godzilla.  Time and time again, the country has chosen collapse over admitting failure. On November 19, 2012, Bloomberg reported, “The Japanese government will spend 1 trillion yen ($12.3B) on a second round of fiscal stimulus as it tries to revive an economy at risk of sliding into recession.”  It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.

The United Kingdom gets third place in the 2001-2011 major economies’ “Race to Oblivion”, although with a less than 3.5% share of world GDP it’s hard to call this a major economy with a straight face anymore.  While the U.K. printed its way to 24% loss in world GDP, France and Brazil both passed the nation where an actual troy pound of sterling silver now costs about 235 “pounds sterling”.  With government debt expected to reach 88.7% of GDP in 2012, once-Great Britain will soon be seated at the kids’ table at economic summits, if it gets invited at all.

All three of these countries are in death spirals for the same reason:  They believe that they have the ability to avoid recession by simply printing their own money.  As America’s 100-year numbskull (and current Federal Reserve Chairman) Ben Bernanke once mused:

“…the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”

True dat, Ben….unless there’s “cost” associated with turning the nation’s currency into the world’s laughing stock….

Oh wait, there is.  So just for fun, let’s project the last ten years growth rates forward another ten years:

And there you have the real New World Order (sorry Freemasons).  In ten years China’s economy will be bigger than those of the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. combined.  What are the chances they will drink the same kool-aid we are presently guzzling?  Will they need, or even tolerate, the opinions spewed by our pundits and politicians?  And more importantly, will the U.S. dollar still be the world’s reserve currency?

Being a war-mongering banana republic isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and despite what CNBC’s fast-money fuckwits may think, the stock market is not America’s report card.  Wall Street is the white elephant that America can’t afford to feed anymore and China doesn’t have the slightest interest in buying (just take a look at the Shanghai Composite).   Continuing to yield to its tantrums will undoubtedly destroy us.

Fun Facts:  Total U.S. GDP growth in the 20th century was $9.93 Trillion, while the  government accumulated $5.5 Trillion in debt.  In the 21st century, the US has borrowed $10.7T and has a grand total of $5.30T in GDP growth.

***

Notes for nerds: Most of the calculations presented were derived from data compiled by the World Bank which can be viewed or downloaded here.   World GDP was set to 100% and each country’s percentage determined simply by dividing by world GDP.   Japan’s debt as a percentage of GDP from Fred (225% was used for 2011).  Estimate of U.K.’s 2012 Debt/GDP from here.  U.S. GDP stats from USgovernmentspending.com (2012 estimate adjusted for 2% growth).  US debt from Debt to the Penny.

Notes for non-nerds:  How much World GDP changes from one year to the next depends entirely on what is being used to measure it.  For example, World GDP expanded by 109% from 2002 to 2011 in USD terms, but contracted (-59%) in terms of gold.  Using the Euro would produce different results (+59%), as would using barrels of oil (you figure it out).  Looking at countries relative to World GDP is an honest measure of their changes.  To say that Japan is still growing (at least in terms of Yen), but everyone else is growing much, much faster in terms of Yen distorts the reality that  Japan is undeniably shrinking relative to the world (no matter what currency is used).

 Seth Mason, Charleston SC

Rick Santelli's Epic Rant On Jobs Report

Watch CNBC's Rick Santelli go on a tear about the BLS's improbable September jobs report: