Unemployment

This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros. Hard on the heels of yesterday’s Latvian GDP numbers we now have news that Estonia’s economy shrank at the slowest annual pace in a year at the end of 2009 as a modest recovery in…

The past week saw a huge fall in the number of persons making an initial filing for jobless claims. The U.S. Department of Labor reported: In the week ending Feb. 6, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 440,000,…

The Atlantic has an epic piece on employment trends in America in this month’s issue.  This is a must-read piece of journalism, not just for the anecdotes and analysis of this particular downturn, but also for its statistics and…

This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros. Well, as we say in English, it never rains but it pours. Latvia, which has had the deepest recession of all 27 European Union member states, contracted by nearly 18 per cent in the…

John Mauldin’s latest is about spotting asset bubbles and the potential government policy response. But he also has a lot to say about the latest employment situation survey and the situation in Greece with an apt comparison to the U.S. In…

Last week I showed you a chart from ProPublica in my post State unemployment insurance insolvency: 50 little Hoovers which demonstrated how states are being killed by the financial strains of unemployment insurance.  Well, this week…

A lot of people are questioning the unemployment rate of 9.7% in the face of a –20,000 non-farm payroll print.  How could we be losing jobs and have the unemployment rate drop? It would seem people are dropping out of the labor force.…

Those are the numbers. But this month’s unemployment rate and the non-farm payrolls number are less important this go round. The devil is in the details here because we have some major benchmark revisions and that means changes to…

This past Monday I was on the BBC talking about the recently unveiled Fiscal Year 2011 Budget proposed by the Obama Administration for the U.S. Federal Government.  The budget is, as with most things Obama, a tightrope walk between the…

This morning, I left just in time to see the U.S. Department of Labor’s jobless claims numbers for the preceding week.  They were not good.  Initial claims hit 480,000 for the week ending 30 Jan 2010, pushing the 4-week average up…