Weekly Jobless Numbers—No Green Shoots This Week

There was a net loss of 467,000 jobs in June, compared with a revised loss of 322,000 jobs in May. This was the first time in four months that the number of jobs lost rose from the prior month.

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The unemployment rate rose for the ninth straight month, climbing to 9.5% from 9.4%, and hitting another 26-year high. Economists had been expecting that the unemployment rate would hit 9.6%.

Meteor Blades at Daily Kos looks still deeper:

The official count – known as U3 and dutifully reported by most of the media – fails to show the true extent of the wreckage. Left out of most reporting is U6, the BLS calculation that includes involuntarily underemployed people. That is, those who want a full-time job, but can only find part-time work. Also missing from U3 are discouraged jobless people who haven’t looked for work during the past four weeks. The U6 figure rose in June to 16.5%.

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In late May, 74% of economists surveyed by the National Association of Business Economists said the economy would begin expanding this quarter although they expected unemployment to continue rising into 2010 before beginning its recovery. One disturbing trend can be found in how long it took in the four previous recessions before the number of workers with job equaled the number employed at the beginning of those recessions. In 1974, the job recovery took 19 months; in 1981, 28 months; in 1991, 32 months; in 2001, 47 months.

Read Meteor Blades’ entire piece. There are always more numbers than are in the headlines.