US Employment Trends - Growth & Recovery?

The following two graphics neatly sum up the stalled growth engine that is the US locomotive economy in recent years.

First up: US Job Growth by Decade

Take any post-war decade and the US boomed. It was virtually unchallenged in terms of non-farm employment growth, GDP and household net worth. Suddenly, it ambled aimlessly (the red line) after 2000. What caused it? Improved technology that reduced the dependency on labour, outsourcing to Asia, stringent new (green)regulatory hurdles that were not conducive to business investment?

Second up: The Length of Recovery
The latest job losses in this recession are much deeper (the red line again) and this revival is on course to be much longer, comparable at best to the post 2001 recovery. That is, unless there are new extraordinary measures by Obama to bend the curve steeply back up over a shorter timespan.


The US consumer is becoming a rarer species...exporting nations will need to rethink that lucrative market which has served them so well in the last decade...they will have to seek deeper from within their domestic markets.