Unemployment

There has been a lot of back and forth by academic economists on monetary policy. The reason is two-fold. First, during the so-called Great Moderation many economists increasingly looked to monetary over fiscal policy for countercyclical…

I wrote you last week after the third consecutive elevated jobless claims report, saying this was a definite harbinger of a weak jobs report. This has proved true. While March's gain of 120,000 jobs was revised up to 154,000 and…

Note the peak in manufacturing jobs in June 1977, which represented 22 percent of all nonfarm payrolls, then, to fall to less than 9 percent of total employment today. It’s too earlier to claim victory with the current recovery in the…

The jobless claims came out again today and the numbers were weak.

Today we look at the jobs recovery by various industries.

The Fed is out of bullets on interest rate policy and has turned to other nonconventional measures like quantitative easing. Excess reserves have piled up as a result. What does this mean for inflation and the economy?

In the week just ended, the US Department of Labor is reporting the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims as 386,000. While this is a decrease of 2,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 388,000 it is well above the…

The jobs numbers were disappointing. From a policy perspective, the hope is that we can keep stimulus in the queue long enough so that the cyclical hiring trends pick up before overindebted consumers get fatigued again. But underneath…

One word can summarize today's report: disappointing. The 120k rise in the headline figure was roughly half of the whisper figure. The unemployment rate ticked down to 8.2%, but the details are disappointing.

Here's what I see: job destruction during a cyclical downturn followed by massive job destruction after the Lehman failure followed by a steady climb toward tepid job creation. Take a look.