We have never seen an extended precipitous decline of this nature before. But instead of admitting that we have a very serious problem on our hands, many mainstream economists are dismissing this decline as "structural in nature". For example, check out the following excerpt from a recent Reuters article...
A paper published on Thursday by the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, suggested the decline was primarily due to an aging population and other structural factors, and concluded the labor force would continue to shrink.
But there is a major flaw in this analysis. It turns out that older Americans are the only group for which employment numbers have actually been going up. I really like how Zero Hedge made this point the other day...
Well that's very odd, because it was only two months ago that the Census wrote the following [5]: "Many older workers managed to stay employed during the recession; in fact, the population in age groups 65 and over were the only ones not to see a decline in the employment share from 2005 to 2010 (Figure 3-25)... Remaining employed and delaying retirement was one way of lessening the impact of the stock market decline and subsequent loss in retirement savings."
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