Here are a couple of charts that, at first glance, don’t seem to have much in common but, combined, they add important context to the U.S. economy, offering more evidence of the growing divide between the rich and poor.
First, from a story at Marketwatch comes this graphic about a U.S. asset bubble that is even more durable than the Canadian housing bubble – farmland.
There are many reasons for rising farmland prices and easy money is at or near the top of the list, however, this characteristic of the modern day U.S. financial system clearly (surprise!) has a much bigger positive impact on asset prices than jobs.
In demonstration of the latter, another alternative measure of the labor market appeared in this item at the Economic Policy Institute where “missing workers” were added back into the U-6 unemployment rate with some unsurprising results.
I’d forgotten about this but, as detailed in this report at the EPI, there’s another group of people who want jobs beyond “discouraged workers” who, while they haven’t looked for work in the past four weeks, have looked sometime in the last year.
Missing workers are people who still want to work but who haven’t looked in the last year and, according to the EPI, there are about five million Americans in this group.
