I have been writing in Richard C. Young’s Intelligence Report for many months that the U.S. economy is far from on sound footing. I have also been advising on the bubble condition in the stock and bond markets. Most of the blame lies at the feet of the Marxist-influenced policies of the Obama administration. As time passes, conditions continue to erode, and yet the government continues to borrow from abroad a big portion of what it spends. The debt burden on Americans continues to balloon as the Fed continues to debase the currency with its money printing excess. All of this will come to an unpleasant end. It is simply a matter of who is going to be left holding the bag when the charade ends. Mort Zuckerman correctly writes that this recovery is a phony.
In recent months, Americans have heard reports out of Washington and in the media that the economy is looking up—that recovery from the Great Recession is gathering steam. If only it were true. The longest and worst recession since the end of World War II has been marked by the weakest recovery from any U.S. recession in that same period.
The jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling. In June, the government’s Household Survey reported that since the start of the year, the number of people with jobs increased by 753,000—but there are jobs and then there are “jobs.” No fewer than 557,000 of these positions were only part-time. The survey also reported that in June full-time jobs declined by 240,000, while part-time jobs soared by 360,000 and have now reached an all-time high of 28,059,000—three million more part-time positions than when the recession began at the end of 2007.
That’s just for starters. The survey includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can’t get it, as well as those who want to work but have stopped looking. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May.
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