Le marché du travail US a fourni des chiffres forts, mais en réalité ils sont trompeurs.

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The U.S. labor market is seemingly indestructible, shaking off recession fears with its 105th straight month of growth, a record streak that seems almost too strong to be true. Maybe that’s because it kind of is.

In the short term, the report that employers added 224,000 jobs last month, more than expected, raises doubts about whether the Fed will cut interest rates at its policy meeting later this month. But the job market’s long-term trends aren’t as strong as June’s numbers would suggest, write Lakshman Achuthan and Anirvan Banerji of the Economic Cycle Research Institute. The year-over-year rate of job growth has slowed lately, and unemployment has fallen (aside from rising a tiny bit in June) mostly because people keep dropping out of the labor market.

Meanwhile, all this hiring has done little to increase workers’ share of the overall economic pie, writes Karl Smith. A truly strong job market would see wages rising, kids foregoing college and retirement-age workers coming in off the sidelines. That all happened in in the 1990s, Karl writes. None of it is happening now.

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