In case you weren’t depressed enough about the state of the U.S. labor market and the 7.2 million jobs lost since the start of the recession, check out this factoid from JPMorgan economist Michael Feroli:
“We would need payroll gains of 200,000 per month every month for three straight years just to get back to late 2007 levels of employment, and even that calculation ignores the labor force growth over the intervening years.”
Take your pick of bad September job news: the average workweek declined; average hourly earnings increased a paltry 0.1 percent; the broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment rose to 17 percent; and the average duration of unemployment hit an all-time high of 26.2 weeks.
Welcome to the recovery.
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