While the Fed is digesting what the X-13 Arima seasonally adjusted payrolls number means for the future of US interest rates, the devastation of the US labor force continues.

In what was an "modestly" unpleasant July payrolls report, yet somewhat better than June's flagrant disappointment, the fact is that the number of Americans not in the labor force rose once again, this time by 144,000 to a record 93,770,000 million, with the result a participation rate of 62.6% which remains at a level more indicative of the September 1977 economy.

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End result: with the civilian employment to population ratio flat from last month's 59.3%, one can once again easily discern on the chart below why there will be no broad wage growth any time soon, which will merely allow the Fed to engage in its failed policies for a long, long time, or - at worst - hike by 25 bps just so it can, like BOJ in 2000 and the ECB in 2011, cut promptly thereafter and/or unleash QE4.

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Comment: And who got all the jobs in the July payrolls report? Once again from Zerohedge:


Prime Aged Workers Tumble In July, Workers 55 And Over Surge To New All Time High

By now what we first, heretically, said back in 2010: that the US is becoming a part-time economy, is common knowledge only the politically correct way of phrasing it, one which supposedly gives it a bullish spin, is "the sharing economy", as if that makes it better for millions of millennials that they will never again have any career security whatsoever.

But one other, even more damaging trend has yet to be noticed: the fact that elderly workers, still unable to retire due to ZIRP's crushing of their trillions in savings which have a "high yield" of under 1% at best, remain in the workforce, and the result is that there is no opportunity for young workers to enter the labor pipeline on the other end.

July confirmed as much, when in a month in which the Establishment survey reported that 215K jobs were added, the Household survey was far less sanguine, estimating only 101K job gains in June after a drop of 56K in May. But the punchline emerged when looking at the age composition of the job winners... and losers.

As we expected, more than all job gains, or 211,000 of the total, came in the 55 and over job category. Workers 16-24 lost a total of 8,000 jobs. And the worst hit were, who else, those in their prime, as the number of workers aged 25-54 dropped by another 131K.
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Putting this in perspective, while the elderly workers in the US have risen by a whopping 7.4 million since the start of the Depression in December 2007, workers aged 25-54 are down 4 million!
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And an even clearer way of showing this dramatic convergence: young vs old workers. But don't blame your father or grandfather for taking a job that you would like: they are simply unable to retire due to nearly a decade of idiotic Fed policies.
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As a result: this.
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