Jobs

The U.S. Department of Labor just released the weekly report for unemployment insurance claims. Initial claims were 384,000, while continuing claims rose to 3.139 million. The 4-week average moved up to 3,099,250. This is 593,000 more…

Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture is on to something. He has found A Perfect Recession Indicator. Since 1953, when year-over-year Non-Farm payrolls have gone negative, there has been a recession. This happened nine out of nine times for…

The U.S. economy is losing jobs fast. I will have more to say about this later, but I wanted to get out a link to Bloomberg's coverage of the 8:30 unemployment report. There's also a link to the report under the "Economic Data" section in…

Every week the U.S. Department of Labor puts out the previous week's jobless claims statistics through its Employment and Training Administration (Doleta). Analysts look at it to get a sense of how employment is being affected by the…

This chart speaks for itself.See also:Unemployment Report: biggest rise in rate in two decadesChart of the day: Change in jobless claims

The U.S. has been flashing red regarding recession for some time despite the naysayers.First, let me define recession because you usually hear that it's two consecutive quarters of a decline in real GDP. Not exactly. The National Bureau…

As with the GDP numbers last week, the employment numbers were very dubious indeed. The headline number was still a loss of 20,000 jobs. However, the detail point to likely revisions much beyond that number when more exact data have been…

There was heavy overbuilding in Spain as the global housing bubble caught fire there these past years. Now, Spain's bubble has burst and it is having dire economic consequences. The Spanish National Statistics Office released the most…