The labor market may be experiencing the "perfect amount of growth," with sustained monthly job growth keeping pace with inflation growth, but it's not without its flaws.
A decade after the economic crash, the "shadow" of the Great Recession still looms over the nation's workers in a few ways. One noteworthy metric is that there are more job openings than unemployed Americans for the first time on record, writes Matt O'Brien for The Washington Post, yet, the chance that an unemployed worker who lost their job six months ago would still be unemployed today is 9.9 percent, one percent worse than the rate from mid-2006 or mid-2007, and nearly doubles the rate from the late 1990s.
This is the kind of economy that central bankers dream about. No, really, they had to dream about it. That’s because, other than the late 1990s, we’ve never seen the confluence of so much positive economic news like we are now ... And there’s no sign the economy is going to wake up from this dream anytime soon ... [But] one thing is for sure: A central banker’s dream might be close, but it still isn’t a worker’s dream.
