Manufacturing's share of all U.S. employment fell to an all-time record low of 8.48% in May. While blame has been laid at the foot of globalization and technology, in fact it has been an almost non-stop decline since the end of World War 2.
So how do we 'make America great again'?
The answer seems simple to some in Washington - World War 3?
Submitted by Eric Hickman of Kessler Companies
We have begun to see the 'event-horizon' (Lance Roberts) of an economic slowdown in several indicators. Adding to that, and counter-intuitively perhaps, an unemployment rate this low (4.29%) is a signal to run-away from Stocks and run-to Treasuries.
Authored by Michael Hudson, via NakedCapitalism.com,
Students usually don’t think of themselves as a class. They seem “pre-class,” because they have not yet entered the labor force. They can only hope to become part of the middle class after they graduate. And that means becoming a wage earner – what impolitely is called the working class.
If you believe San Francisco Fed President John Williams, the US labor market has almost never been ore robust than it is today. Of course, middle- and working-class Americans who are struggling with levels of financial uncertainty that would be unfamiliar to their parents’ generation don’t necessarily care that the official unemployment rate is 4.4%. They’re too busy struggling to make ends meet when real wages have been stagnant for decades and economic growth is expected to slouch along at 2% for the foreseeable future.
If May was supposed to be the "tiebreaker" month, after a disastrous March and a solid (if now downward revised) April, then the US economy is not doing well: with only 138K jobs added in the past month, while over 200K actual jobs were lost (per the Household Survey), it was no surprise that the biggest missing link of the so-called recovery, wage growth, was simply not there again.
How is it that with the labor market supposedly near full employment, and the unemployment rate sliding to a post 2001 low of 4.3%, wages simply can not rise?