Friday, December 4, 2009

US Unemployment Falls to 10%

The US unemployment rate fell last month to 10%, but the headline number is not the good news, the really good news is that the entire US economy shed only 11,000 jobs. Compare this to January when the US economy shed over 700,000 jobs to get a sense of the scale of the thing. The Oregon economy alone shed 23,000 jobs in February.

But this is the dismal science so it is worth noting two things: the stimulus is at its full effect right now and will dissipate and producers are catching up after drawing down inventories but catching up to a new lower overall demand than before.

But this could signal that we have finally reached the most important turning point of the recession but I'll make that call when the jobs number actually turns positive.

1 comment:

Chuck said...

James K. Galbraith write on Nov 11t, 2009 "I'm tempted to say that the United States is plainly unable to cope with the economic crisis in a serious way. The barriers are philosophical, procedural, and constitutional. So long as economic thinking is mired in a world that disappeared with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, so long as any action requires 60 Senate votes, and so long as political capital erodes from the start of a fixed four-year presidential term, we're stuck." Galbraith's statement is in line with my Minsky inspired understanding of the current crisis. Unemployment will stay high and for quite some time. Galbraith quote at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-k-galbraith/old-mistakes-die-hard_b_367572.html