 Hello. This is Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute, and this is episode four of Minor Issues. In this episode, we look at the mundane information contained in the unemployment rate. Last week, we noted that there was a new record low unemployment rate in the United States, which the media and the Fed and President Biden all celebrated. What we're going to be talking about today is probably more important, but it's not mentioned in the news media and certainly not by the Fed or the President or just about anybody else. And what I want to do today is look back at previous business cycle lows in the unemployment rate and what happened right after that. Well, the most recent low occurred in late 2019 at 3.6 percent unemployment, and then of course we ended up the economy going down and we ended up with instead of an economic crisis, we ended up with a COVID crisis and a very short recession thanks to all the government spending. And if we go back to the housing bubble, we also see an unemployment rate in the low four percent range, and then of course a long recession combined with the financial crisis. Taking a couple steps back to late 1999, late in that year, we find the unemployment rate below four percent right before the tech stock bubble broke and the stock market crashed. Then as we go back, we see these business cycle lows all coming right before the next recession or the next economic crisis. We had that in the late 80s, early 90s before the recession. We had a temporary low and a real low in the late 1970s before the stagflation of the 1980s took hold in a very hard way. And then of course the unemployment rate right before we went off the gold standard and embarked on the stagflation of the 1970s was also below four percent. And we go back and we see a similar pattern of very low cyclical unemployment and that's quickly followed by recessions. And that goes all the way back, not in the Fed data, but in my memory to a book that reported that the unemployment rate in 1929 was less than three percent. And by the end of the next year, it was close to nine percent in 1931. It was 16 percent and in 1932, it was 24 percent. So I think the most important thing about record low unemployment rates or at least cyclical lows in the unemployment rate is that it's a very direct signal that the Fed has overheated the economy and that more inflation and more unemployment are on the way. I thought you needed to know that as you plan your own life around the economy. And the important thing here is that nobody at the Fed, nobody at the mainstream media and President Biden did not celebrate the record low unemployment rate by warning you that there's a very good possibility that that is a signal of an economic recession right around the corner.