Prices matter. They are the economists’ canary in the coal mine, an indicator of what is to come. Not necessarily as grim an indicator as when we have here a dead canary, but a pointer that cannot be ignored. When oil prices plummeted, analysts paid attention, hunting for causes and effects. Wages are the price of labor. So when the government reported late last week that average hourly earnings rose in April by a puny 0.1%, or three cents an hour, the failure of that price to rise suggested that still another price, the price of money, better known as interest rates, might be kept at close to zero by the Federal Reserve Board’s monetary policy committee. “The low rate of wage growth is, to me, another sign that the Fed’s job is not yet done,” Yellen revealed last year.

The economy did succeed in adding 223,000 jobs in April, after a meager 85,000 in March (revised down from the original estimate of 126,000). The headline unemployment rate remains at 5.4%; when workers too discouraged to continue hunting for work, and those involuntarily working part-time are included, the rate jumps to 10.8%, while the labor force participation rate remains virtually unchanged at a low 62.8%.