Rogé Karma

So...

What you have to understand is that historically, young college graduates in their 20s have had a lower unemployment rate than the rest of the workforce and usually a much lower unemployment rate than the rest of the workforce.

It makes sense.

They've just spent four years soaking up all this education, the relatively cheap labor.

And so usually they get much better employment prospects coming out of school.

Recently, that has flipped.

So ever since about 2022, the unemployment rate for young college graduates has actually risen nearly twice as fast as the rest of the labor force and currently is significantly higher.

So the unemployment rate right now for, again, 22 to 27-year-old college graduates is about 6%, close to 6%, which is unusually high

even as the overall unemployment rate is close to 4%, which is near a 50-year low.

Yeah, since 2022.

The big freeze is essentially what happens when a labor market grinds to a halt.

So the statistic that actually blows my mind here is that even though the unemployment rate, again, is near 50-year lows, the hiring rate, the rate at which people are getting hired for new jobs, has dropped to its lowest level since 2010.

Wow.

When unemployment was at near 10%, this was the depths of the Great Recession.

We are now experiencing, by the unemployment rate, what looks like a great labor market.

And yet...

employers aren't hiring, therefore employees aren't able to find new jobs, and this is basically a labor market that is frozen in amber.

Exactly.

That is basically it, right?

When there is a lot of churn in the labor force, when there's a lot of people like playing that game of musical chairs, right?