by JL Yastine
The Sovereign Investor
I have one question for you: Where were you in 1973?
I was 9 years old; my family had just moved from New Jersey to the swampy outback of southwestern Florida. It was the year my beloved New York Mets lost to the Oakland A’s in the World Series. The last American troops left Vietnam. And the Senate Watergate hearings were all over the national news.
It was also the year of an impressive economic milestone: a string of 76 consecutive weeks, dating back to the summer of 1972, in which fewer than 300,000 people (as measured in a four-week moving average to smooth out the volatility of the data) filed for initial jobless claims.
Since then, we’ve dipped below that mark a few times, for a few quarters. But the last time the U.S. economy has ever been robust enough to sustain a weekly jobless claims level that low, for that long, would be…