A Little Thursday Negativity
In case you were wondering (Congress, pundits, and other elites, I’m looking at you), this is not good.
Fully 500,000 Americans filed new claims for government unemployment insurance last week, the highest number in nine months and a sign of persistent trouble in the job market.
Everyone is familiar with the monthly national unemployment rate, which comes out on the first Friday of each month and now stands at 9.5 percent, according to the July numbers, the most recent available. That number gives us a monthly, detailed, deep look into unemployment in the U.S.
But the new weekly jobless claims number, which is released each Thursday by the Labor Department, gives us a faster, week-by-week snapshot of unemployment. And the picture is getting increasingly ugly.
Today’s number marked the third straight week of increase in new weekly jobless claims. That suggests that employers not only are not hiring, it suggests that they’re starting to lay off workers again, and that will start a whole cascade of problems for the U.S. economy and the politicians in Washington who face reelection this November.
It’s especially not good for California, Indiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Georgia.
And this is not enough of a silver lining to make this cloud do anything but pour on us.
The number of weekly unemployment claims is still far below the levels seen in early 2009, when initial claims were rolling in at a pace above 600,000 per week.
President Obama used today’s bad jobs data to urge Congress to restart the stalled small business jobs bill that he said would help small businesses with tax cuts and expense write-offs, and would help small banks lend to small businesses.
We need more.
Tags: unemployment
“President Obama used today’s bad jobs data to urge Congress to restart the stalled small business jobs bill that he said would help small businesses with tax cuts and expense write-offs, and would help small banks lend to small businesses.”
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They never learn, do they?
The problem is NO DEMAND.
Washington can give all the tax breaks they want and make credit easier to get, but if there is no one to buy the output of business, then there cannot be a real recovery.
The politicians were hoping and praying that pumping up the financial sector would generate a lot of jobs. They spent their wad doing so. Now they have failed and 15 million people are still unemployed.
I see a lot of Washington incumbents becoming lobbyists after the November elections.
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