The Long-Term Unemployed

Following the March NFP disappointment, it was only reasonable to expect a modest beat in this month's data which came at +165,000, on expectations of +140,000, and following a revision to the March number from 88K to 138K. The unemployment rate declined from 7.6% to 7.5% beating, expectations of an unchanged print. The flipside, as always, is that the labor participation rate remained flat, at 63.3%, once again the lowest since 1979.

Almost 30 million adults were in a job in the quarter to last November, up by more than half a million on the previous year, reports The Telegraph. The figure, giving an employment rate of 71pc, is the highest since records began in 1971, according to the Office for National Statistics on Wedesday. Unemployment fell by 37,000 in the latest quarter to just under 2.5 million, the lowest since spring 2011.

Moments ago Fed vice-chair Janet Yellen released a speech titled: "A Painfully Slow Recovery for America's Workers: Causes, Implications, and the Federal Reserve's Response." In it, Yellen finally revealed she is on the path to realizing the it is none other than the Fed's own actions that have broken the economic "virtuous cycle", and that Okun's Law - the bedrock behind the Fed's flawed philosophy of assuming more debt -> more GDP -> more jobs, is no longer relevant in the broken "New Normal.

Yahoo!Finance reports Most of the unemployed no longer receive benefitsEarly last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent -- a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America's 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

Last week I wrote that if kids in school had a better idea of the extent to which dropping out of high school correlates with being unemployed, that they might work harder and stay in school and that this, in turn, would improve their lives. The most popular source of pushback I got on this basically followed the Jon Chait school of thought:

By Mike Konczal Live at The Week, Brad Delong writes Does Washington care about unemployment?: Today, the unemployment rate is kissing 10 percent. Global financial markets are sending us a message that the excess demand for high-quality financial assets is growing again. Yet, unlike 1983, there is no sense of urgency in Washington. ...

In a free market, companies should be allowed to decide whether or not to offer paid sick leave to employees. At the margin, employees who value paid sick leave will flow to companies that offer it and employees that don’t won’t; also at the margin, companies that offer paid sick leave will be able to pay their employees a little less in other forms of compensation. Everything works out for the best.