Bureau of Labor Statistics

In President Obama's speeches this year, a steady theme has been creating jobs and economic opportunity for Americans. Yet during the more than five years Mr. Obama has been in office, young people have been especially hard-hit by the slow and virtually jobless recovery. On a deeply human level, it's profoundly sad. The message to Obama - "The bottom line on labor: Make something less expensive and businesses will use more of it. Make something more expensive and businesses will use less of it."

Nonfarm productivity in the frost-bitten US in Q1 plunged at its fastest pace since Q1 2008. The 3.2% drop is considerably bigger than the 3% expected but was accompanied (oddly) by a rise in employee hours (so despite the catastrophic weather, everyone was going to work and working more) but producing less. Unit labor costs soared 5.7% - the most since Q4 2012.

soaring food prices are not only already here but are set to surge even more, especially for those who rather eat real meat than mystery meat dispensed with largesse at your favorite $0.99 fast food. So what are food processors to do facing soaring meat input costs and unwilling to suffer bottom line hits? Why, return to that old staple of unknown origin of course.

Here comes Pink Slime... again.

If oil is “just another commodity,” then there shouldn’t be any connection between oil prices, debt levels, interest rates, and total rates of return. But there clearly is a connection. As we have seen, rising interest rates will bring an end to our current equilibrium, by raising costs in many ways, without raising salaries. It will also reduce equity values and bond prices. A rise in the cost of extraction of oil, if it isn’t accompanied by high oil prices, will also put an end to our equilibrium, because oil producers will stop drilling the number of wells needed to keep production up.  If oil prices rise (regardless of reason), this will tend to put the economy into recession, leading to job loss and debt defaults. The only way to keep things going a bit longer might be negative interest rates. But even this seems “iffy.” We truly live in interesting times.

"This issue of participation in the labor force is a highly contentious one," notes RDG's Jon Ryding and has been extensively discussed here as some people leave the labor pool and retire after giving up on the job search (do people really want to work past age 65 given the choice? Are that many people doing what they love?) But, as Bloomberg reports, there is a growing segment of boomers who are paying for retirement with the proceeds of rallying stocks. For the select few, last year’s 30% surge in the S&P500 capped a bull market now in its sixth year (with 'wealth' trickling down to 401(k)s), but as one wealth manager warned "everyone understands that the market went crazy last year," and while 8 million people aged 65 and older are working, a 72% jump from a decade ago; there are a lucky few who are cashing out with the view that "if I need to, I can go back to work, but right now I’m going to enjoy life."

As the price of meat continues to skyrocket, will it soon be considered a "luxury item" for most American families? This week we learned that the price of meat in the United States rose at the fastest pace in more than 10 years last month. This is really bad news if you like to eat meat. The truth is that the coming "meat crisis" is already here, and it looks like it is going to get a lot worse in the months ahead. Could rapidly rising food prices cause civil unrest in the United States eventually? It won't happen today, and it won't happen tomorrow, but some day it might. Meanwhile, you might want to start carving out a significantly larger portion of the family budget for food for the foreseeable future.

Regardless of which side of the low labor force participation rate argument you stand on, it is hard to argue that it is simply a function of retiring "baby boomers." While political arguments are great for debate, it is the economics that ultimately drive employment. While the Fed has inflated asset prices to the satisfaction of Wall Street, it has done little for the middle class. It is ultimately fiscal policy that will help business create employment, the problem is that businesses need less of it while government officials keep piling on more. In the meantime, stop blaming "baby boomers" for not retiring - they simply can't afford to.

Having questioned whether Tim Geithner leaked every Fed announcement to the banks during his tenure (but did not mention it in his memoirs) and shown that traders acted on information at faster than the speed of light (and thus were indeed aware of leaked decisions ahead of time), it should be no surprise that a new research paper has found “robust evidence” that some traders have been getting early news of U.S. Federal Reserve rate announcements and then trading on it during the Fed’s media lockup. The trading anomalies that Bernile and his colleagues spotted begin about 15 minutes before the news embargo is lifted and continue at a fairly even pace and are "statistically significant and in the direction of the subsequent policy surprise." So - are the markets rigged?

“Rarely Does A Monthly Report On The United States Job Market Look So Terrific On The Surface While Being So Disappointing Underneath”

No, the economy is most definitely not "recovering".  Despite what you may hear from the politicians and from the mainstream media (shrugging off today's terrible GDP print), the truth is that the U.S. economy is in far worse shape than it was prior to the last recession.  In fact, we are still pretty much where we were at when the last recession finally ended.  When the financial crisis of 2008 struck, it took us down to a much lower level economically.  Thankfully, things have at least stabilized at this much lower level.  For example, the percentage of working age Americans that are employed has stayed remarkably flat for the past four years.  We should be grateful that things have not continued to get even worse.  It is almost as if someone has hit the "pause button" on the U.S. economy.  But things are definitely not getting better, and there are a whole host of signs that this bubble of false stability will soon come to an end and that our economic decline will accelerate once again.  The following are 17 facts to show to anyone that believes that the U.S. economy is just fine...

According to shocking new numbers that were just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 percent of American families do not have a single person that is working.  So when someone tries to tell you that the unemployment rate in the United States is about 7 percent, you should just laugh.  One-fifth of the families in the entire country do not have a single member with a job.  That is absolutely astonishing.  How can a family survive if nobody is making any money?  Well, the answer to that question is actually quite easy.  There is a reason why government dependence has reached epidemic levels in the United States.  Without enough jobs, tens of millions of additional Americans have been forced to reach out to the government for help.  At this point, if you can believe it, the number of Americans getting money or benefits from the federal government each month exceeds the number of full-time workers in the private sector by more than 60 million.

For seven years through 2012, the number of Californians aged 50 to 64 who live in their parents' homes swelled 67.6% to about 194,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. Many more young adults live with their parents than those in their 50s and early 60s live with theirs. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 1.6 million Californians have taken up residence in their childhood bedrooms, according to the data. Though that's a 33% jump from 2006, the pace is half that of the 50 to 64 age group.

It's not just beef, pork, shrimp, eggs, and orange juice... If you think that the price of food is high now?  Just wait.  If current trends continue, many of the most common food items that Americans buy will cost more than twice as much by the end of this decade. Even if nothing else bad happens (and that is a very questionable assumption to make), our food prices are going to be moving aggressively upward for the foreseeable future.  But what if something does happen?  In recent years, global food reserves have dipped to extremely low levels, and a single major global event (war, pandemic, terror attack, planetary natural disaster, etc.) could create an unprecedented global food crisis very rapidly.

Democratic strategists have made a blunt declaration in an election-year memo, according to AP, "Don't talk about the economic recovery. It's a political loser." Stan Greenberg, James Carville and others wrote that in head-to-head polling tests the mere mention of the word "recovery" is trumped by a Republican assertion that the Obama administration has had six years to get the economy moving and its policies haven't worked. But, but, but... stocks are at all-time highs?

We previously noted that both beef and pork (courtesy of the affectionately named Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus) prices have been reaching new all time highs on an almost daily basis. It is time to update the chart. Below we show what a world in which the Fed is constantly lamenting the lack of inflation looks like for beef, pork and shrimp prices.