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More than 86% now work in the service-providing industries! Hurray! Never healthier!
The next chart shows the year over year change in the total nominal amount we're collectively spending on services.
Click to enlarge.
There is still 2.5% growth!
Our service economy is therefore still healthy!
The present is still bright!
I still gotta wear shades!
I have mercifully spared you the pain and suffering of short-term and long-term trend lines. Oops. I probably should not have mentioned that. Sorry!
Hey, at least I didn't point out that the current 2.5% growth is almost entirely made up of smoke and mirrors inflation. That really won't add much to "real" services job growth from here if it continues. Oops. I did it again. Sorry!
I'm drawing the line. No amount of torture could make me confess what would happen to services employment if the growth rate in services continues to fall like it did as the dotcom bubble was popping or as the housing bubble was popping. @#$%! There's nothing I can say now to adequately express my remorse over implying the obvious. Shame on me!
I'm determined to end on an upbeat note though, so trust me on this. The future is still so bright! I gotta wear moonshades!
“I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth.” - Janeane Garofalo
See Also:
Still Investing
Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Service-Providing Employees / Total Nonfarm Employees
St. Louis Fed: Personal Consumption Expenditures: Services (YoY)
3 comments:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=lXW
is a chart I made today that blew my mind about our so-called service economy.
Yeah, it services you alright.
Troy,
Yeah, it services you alright.
That's why Dr. Bernanke is repeatedly performing resurrectal exams.
I sure hope there's not a blockage someday!
Gallows humor. Shame on me.
Troy,
I'm not a doomer per se -- as long as we can produce enough food and fuel to feed ourselves, nothing else really matters -- but it's weird how little us Americans understand what this upcoming reality is going to bring.
The future is not going to be like the past. I don't think we're heading towards a Soylent Green future, but if we don't get our political process sorted, things are going to get pretty weird around here.
That's pretty much my thinking as well. I'm a permabear but not a permadoomer. I would like to think that I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Most of the charts I post here are rather gloomy, but they are mostly intended to punch holes in the overly optimistic beliefs seen elsewhere.
Like you, I believe that the future is not going to be like the past, much to the dismay of ivory tower economists like Jeremy Siegel predicting more of the same (extrapolating 200 years of rear view mirror economic data well into the future). Still waiting on those mythical 3.5% real yields and a stock market that could mythically tolerate them!
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