Although Fed argues that full employment is at hand, underemployment is a growing problem - BBH

Marc Chandler, Global Head of Currency Strategy at BBH, argues that reports suggest that although the Fed argues that full employment is at hand, underemployment is a growing problem. He further adds that businesses cannot use the full skill set its employees have developed ad the research suggests that around 40% of new college graduates have jobs that do not require a college degree.

Key quotes: 

"Growth in output per hour of work has slowed.  From 2007 through 2016, productivity rose about 1% per year. From 2000 through 2007 productivity rose by nearly 2.6% a year.  In the 1990s, output per hour rose 2.2% annually.  The US has created 7.8 mln jobs over the past three years, but growth (GDP) has been mostly disappointing.   The US economy grew 1.6% last year, the weakest in five years." 

"One of the themes of the Political Economy of Tomorrow is that nothing fails like success.  Businesses have succeeded in keeping labor costs down.  This could be one of the key reasons why productivity growth is poor.  Business wants to keep their wage bill down as they want to minimize the cost of inputs and labor is understood as another input."

"One of the key drivers of productivity is technology or replacing human effort with machines and smarter machines.  A powerful incentive of this is the relative cost of labor and technology.  By ensuring cheap labor, businesses have less incentive replace people with machines.    Real wage growth in the US has been minimal since 2000, and the real minimum wage is low relative to 50 years ago."  

"Weak wage growth means that it may be economical to hire people to perform low productivity activity.  Employment then expands in such areas and lower the aggregate measures.  This depresses capital investment and productivity."