Maybe they have been numbed by all the bad news elsewhere but the loss of 51,000 American jobs in July does not seem to bother investors much.

It should. Beneath the headline unemployment rate of 5.7 per cent, the jobs market is fast deteriorating. In the past 12 months, the workforce has increased by 1.4m people, yet the number employed has dropped by more than 200,000. America needs to create more than 115,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth.