The Chart That Proves Mainstream Media Is Lying To You About UnemploymentMichael Snyder At this point, the unemployment rate has become so meaningless that it really isnt even worth paying much attention to. If you really want to know what the employment picture looks like in the United States, you need to look at the employment-population ratio. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development defines the employment rateas the employment-to-population ratio. The employment-population ratio is many American economists favorite gauge of the American jobs picture. According to Paul Ashworth, chief North American economist for Capital Economics, The employment population ratio is the best measure of labor market conditions. This is a statistical ratiothat measures the proportion of the countrys working-age population (ages 15 to 64 in most OECD countries) that is employed. This includes people that have stopped looking for work. A chart of the employment-population ratio in the United States over the past several years is posted below Yes, we should be thankful that things have stabilized, but as you can see there has been no recovery. The percentage of Americans with a job is essentially exactly where it was three years ago. Despite the trillions of dollars that the U.S. government has borrowed, and despite the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing, the employment situation in the U.S. has not turned around. Data for the employment-population ratio from the beginning of 2008is posted below 2008-01-01 62.9 So is there anyone out there that still wants to insist that the employment picture in the United States is getting significantly better? Anyone that wants to claim that unemployment is going down should at least wait until the unemployment-population ratio gets back up to 59 percent. Otherwise they just look foolish. Yes, the Dow is at an all-time high right now. But a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts. Most Americans understand that the Dow has been pumped up with all of the funny money that the Fed has been printing. Most Americans understand that the stock market really does not accurately reflect the health of the U.S. economy as a whole. Just consider these numbers -The number of homeless people sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City has increased by 19 percent over the past year. -According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either poor or low income at this point. -Median household income in the United States has fallen for four consecutive years. No, the truth is that everything is most definitely not fine. If everything is fine, then why did the Federal Reserve inject another 100 billion dollars into foreign banks during the last full week of February? The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve are desperately trying to prop up the entire global economy. Unfortunately, the global financial system has been built on a foundation of sand and the tide is coming in. Back in 2008, a derivatives crisis was one of the primary causes of the worst financial panic since the Great Depression. So did we learn our lesson? No, the boys on Wall Street are back at it again as a recent article by Jim Armitage described Historically, stock markets, being driven by humans, have tended to have a similar length memory of catastrophes, before making the same dumb mistakes again. But it hasnt even been five years since derivatives (on that occasion based on daft mortgages) blew up the world, and yet these exotic creatures have already returned. With a vengeance. Research from Thomson Reuters declared that banks were creating more derivatives known as asset-backed securities than at any time since before the Lehman Brothers crash. Of those, 22 percent were made up of and forgive me the alphabet soup here CDOs and CLOs. The very type of derivatives that exploded last time. At this stage last year, only 6 percent fell into those categories. In other words, banks are creating more of the riskiest types of the riskiest products. When that happens, financial markets all over the globe will crash, economic activity will grind to a standstill and unemployment will go skyrocketing once again. But, as you saw above, we have never even come close to recovering from the last crisis. So you can believe the mind-numbing propaganda that the mainstream media is trying to feed you if you want. Unfortunately, the reality of the matter is that we have not recovered from the last major economic crisis, and another one is rapidly approaching. I hope that you are getting ready. This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here. linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 