Unemployment

Jobless claims hit a 5-year high of 448K last week, leaving everyone under the impression that the employment numbers are deteriorating rapidly. However, the massive increase in jobless claims for the past week is very misleading because…

The number of Americans who have seen their full-time jobs chopped to part time because of weak business has swelled to more than 3.7 million — the largest figure since the government began tracking such data more than half a century…

Further evidence that the housing slump has spilled over into the real economy in Ireland comes from Irish unemployment numbers today, up the most in 41 years of data. Ireland looks to be one of the hardest hit countries in Europe. In all…

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…