Jobs

U.S. jobless claims were 406,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis, up 34,000 on the week prior and surpassing 400,000 for only the 3rd time this business cycle. While the numbers were large, they are very distorted by seasonal adjustment…

Spain had an unemployment rate of 10.4% in the second quarter of 2008, up sharply from 9.6 in the first quarter. The Spanish National Statistics Market said employment in construction jobs were particularly weak as the housing bust in…

When people start losing their jobs, spending goes down. Nothing ties this credit crisis to the real economy like unemployment. And in the UK, it's rising fast.The Office for National Statistics said the amount of people claiming…

With a slew of layoffs ranging from airlines to banking, expect both claims data and the unemployment rate to spike up substantially. This week may be the first such week as jobless claims came in at 404,000, the 2nd time over 400,000 this…

The data was better than expected. I will look to see what a drill down says about the data. My initial take is that the data look fairly benign: construction fell by 43,000, manufacturing employment fell by 33,000. Within…

Challenger Gray & Christmas said announced layoffs were 81,755 last month, up 47% compared to a year ago. For the entire second quarter, layoffs rose to 275,292, the most since late 2005. So far this year,…

The well-deserved euphoria over the European Championship in football has brought welcome relief to Spanish consumers, weighed down by a slow economy. However, global economies have not decoupled from the U.S. slowdown. European economies…

At 8:30 EDT this morning, the Labor department released its jobless claims numbers. The numbers are not appreciably different than a week ago. But they are largely consistent with recession: 384,000 jobless claims and 3,139,000 continuing…

Rumors are that Citigroup is also going to have another big writedown.Citigroup Inc., in the latest sign of bloodletting on Wall Street, is set this week to embark on an aggressive round of layoffs within its investment-banking division,…

I was inputting some statistics into an excel spreadsheet for unemployment claims when it occurred to me: the Bush administration is cooking the books. Not literally, but figuratively. Here's my logic.Let's leave aside whether the…