Janet Yellen just endorsed this new measure of the economy in all but name
Move aside headline unemployment, this Fed chair has a new favourite.
In her written testimony Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen said that "the number of people who are working part time but would prefer a full-time job remains very high."
That's an almost explicit mention of "U6" – one of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' measures of unemployment. The headline rate is "U3".
U6 captures all of that included in U3, along with "discouraged workers" (those who've stopped looking for work), "marginally attached" or "loosely attached workers "(who would like to work have not looked recently), and part-time workers who want to work full-time, but can't for economic reasons.
While the Fed's U3 unemployment threshold is set at 6.5 per cent, that might be roughly equivalent to 11.5 per cent unemployment as measured by U6.
