Back To Even
I didn't get this post up before I left for Omaha and the 2014 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders meeting (writeup coming tomorrow,) but I wanted to share with you the stellar jobs report from Friday.The US economy added 288,000, well ahead of economists expectations and the unemployment rate dropped to 6.3% from 6.7% in April. As I've written about previously, the jobs situation is improving, but there are still many workers who aren't able to find full employment. The percentage of the workforce who are working at less than full employment is currently at 12.3%, which is lower than its peak, but well above the pre-recession survey, which was around 8.5% for most of 2007.
Over at [Calculated Risk](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com), they've been tracking the length and severity of the unemployment situation here in the US. I've been reading these posts since the bottom of the Great Recession and, as shown above, the US is at a milestone of sorts as we've just about made it back to break even in terms of jobs lost/created.We all new it would take a long time to recover from the recession due to its severity, but I don't know of anyone who thought that five years later, we'd still have extremely low interest rates and unemployment still above 6%. Clearly the economy is getting better, but it has and will continue to be a slow recovery.