Unemployment

In July, I blogged on an interesting take on how employment affects equity returns during cyclical recoveries by Van Hoisington and Lacy Hunt. Their thesis was that a recovery in which employment lags the overall upturn significantly is…

Today’s jobless claims report should dispel the notion that the labor market in the United States is getting significantly better.  Initial jobless claims rose again to 551,000 from 534,000 the week prior.  The 4-week average is…

The latest jobless claims data is in, with initial claims registering 530,000 and continuing claims coming in at 6.1 million.  These figures are well off the business cycle highs of a few months ago but still quite elevated. …

The jobless claims numbers have been telling us the same thing for weeks now, namely that the employment market is still weak but that layoffs are gradually slowing. But,  the unadjusted number of initial claims dropped 59k last week…

This comes from the blog News from 1930: An out-of-work broker asked a friend who owned a circus for work. His friend said the circus gorilla had recently died, and if the broker wanted to get into the gorilla's skin, swing around,…

The U.S. Department of Labor confirmed that for yet another week average jobless claims remain in the 560-580K range where they have been for two months. Initial claims for the week ended Sep. 5 were down to 550,000, a decline of 26,000…

The U.S. economy lost 216,000 jobs in August according to figures released by the Department of Labor. This brought the unemployment rate up to 9.7% from 9.4% in July.  Despite the large rise in the headline unemployment rate (U-3),…

Recently Allan Meltzer, a former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, wrote a widely noted and provocative article in the Wall Street Journal called “What Happened to the ‘Depression?’” He called for an end to deficit-inducing stimulus…

The Department of Labor reported that jobless claims in the latest week decreased 4,000 from a revised 574,000 in the previous week.  The figure was higher than analysts anticipated. Initially, the last week was reported as 570,000.…

The U.S. Department of Labor released the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report showing that initial jobless claims decreased 10,000 in the latest week to 570,000 from an upwardly revised 580,000 the week prior. The 4-week moving…