August earned some credit, and I'm not going to bury it. The economy added 162,000 jobs: five times the 12-month average. Participation rose, quits rose. Involuntary part-time work fell by 414,000. Prior months were revised up for the first time in half a year. But two things happened in the same report, and only one is getting covered. Long-term unemployment climbed back to 27%. The 45-to-54 cohort is down 954,000 in a year. One labor market got a recovery. The other is stil

The July jobs report is going to get filed under "quiet month." Payrolls fell 23,000, unemployment ticked down to 4.1%, wages rose 3.2%. Nothing that moves a news cycle on a Friday in August. And that framing is wrong, because the most important thing in this report didn't happen in July. The same release that reported a 23,000-job loss deleted 103,000 jobs from May and June. May was reported as 172,000. It's 63,000 now. An entire quarter of "recovery" just became statistical

By now you've seen the headline: unemployment fell to 4.2% in June, its best print since last summer. Don't. Stop. Reading. There. The number of employed Americans fell by 507,000. the labor force shrank by 720,000 in a single month. And 832,000 people moved into "not in the labor force," a bucket that now holds 105.8 million. the rate didn't improve because people found jobs. It improved because the denominator gave up. Count June's leavers back in and unemployment is roughl