Economatrix Chart Updates

Almost as long as I've been running this blog, I've posted the Calculated Risk Blog's chart of Percent Job Losses in Post WWII Recessions.  It occurred to me today that I haven't posted it in a while so I went looking for it today:

According to this chart, which is again only the news sound bite number that gets released every month, the 2008 recession is over.  The last time I posted this I wrote "... recovery will be complete in late 2014 to early 2015.  But I don't think I believe that".  I based not believing it on a couple of reasons, the biggest being it has no reflection of labor participation rate, which I continue to hear is at levels last seen in the late 1970s. Assuming those people try to start working again, that's going to affect the measured unemployment numbers.

For example, in the May unemployment report, the unemployment rate dropped from 6.7 to 6.3%, but the size of the workforce dropped by 800,000, yet I keep hearing about people having to postpone retirement and working longer.  It would seem to imply that people staying working who would rather be retired are occupying jobs that some of those people out of the work force would like to have.