Jobless America »
Posted By tehranchik 7 months, 1 week ago in Business & FinanceThe unemployment rate is now 8.5%, which is very bad, and is up sharply from 5.1% a year ago. But just check out U6, the broad measure of underemployement: people who want to get more work than they’ve got, but can’t find it. A year ago — three months into the recession — it stood at 9.3%. Today, it’s risen all the way to 16.2% — an increase of 6.9 percentage points — and no one thinks it’s peaked yet. There are now 9 million “involuntary part-time workers” in America, and rising; these people are, as a rule, spending as little as they possibly can.
It’s true that unemployment is a lagging indicator, and that if we’re looking for signs of recovery then the payrolls report is not a great place to start. But there’s nothing here to give any indication that America’s animal spirits have any reason at all to turn around. We, as a nation of individuals, increasingly have neither the ability nor the inclination to borrow money or to spend it — and there’s nothing the banking system can do about that, whether it’s recapitalized or not. So I do wonder where those people forecasting recovery this year think that it’s going to come from.
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tehranchik
Well, I'm from and live in the Pacific Northwest. I did live in the middle east during the late 70's and early 80 ...
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Justice4All7 months, 1 week ago
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At what point did the neocon's stop telling us the economy was great? If Bush were still in office they would probably still be watching FOX news and telling us things are great.
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It's hard to have sympathy for neocon Bush supporters who voted themselves out of a job but this mess is affecting the rest of us too.
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