From David Stockman, at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:
On Friday the BLS reported, among other things, that full-time employment in April had dropped by 252,000 from the prior month and that the weekly earnings of production workers had risen by the grand sum of 67 cents (0.1%) before inflation and taxes. But why should still another confirmation that the main street job market is dead in the water stop the robo-traders from another romp higher?
In fact, this incongruous spectacle of dead wages and soaring financial assets has been going on for several decades now——a transparently obvious trend obfuscated by the unrelenting recency bias of the MSM and the authorized Wall Street/Washington narrative. So let Friday’s incongruous stock market rip serve as a portal into the ugly interior history of how central bank bubble finance has fostered an existential crisis in what remains of American capitalism.
On the main street side, this isn’t a matter of sluggish recovery from a mysterious financial crisis that arrived, apparently, on a comet from deep space in September 2008. Alas, for three decades running now, the constant dollar weekly wages of full-time workers have been flat as a pancake.
And let’s be clear. We are not talking here about after school jobs held by quasi-perpetual students, the meager pay of moonlighting moms or the episodic work gigs of society’s tens of million of loosely attached drifters.
To be sure, the ranks of these marginal job holders have become immense according to the Social Security Administration’s most recent authoritative data—– and it is “authoritative” compared to most of Washington’s statistical mill flotsam because its based on the payroll records of millions of employers who generally do not withhold taxes from ghosts. To wit, there were about 50 million low wage job holders (under $15k/year) who as a group earned an average gross pay of just $6,000 in 2013. So unless there is wholesale violation of the minimum wage laws, upwards of one-third of the US labor force of 155 million is working about 15 hours per week at the lowest lawful pay rate per hour.
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/a-tale-of-two-graphs-why-bubble-finance-will-fail/
To continue reading: A Tale of Two Graphs
See also “Crisis Progress Report (7)-Carry On!” SLL, 5/12/13
