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Notes to myself, possibly of interest to others.
-- Bill Northlich

Friday, April 30, 2010

The Great Recession and the Not-So-Great Recovery

Jim Jubak, MSN Money, 4/30: When GDP began to rise again in June 2009, the U.S. economy kept losing jobs. Since then, 900,000 workers have lost their jobs. Almost three quarters into the recovery, in March, the official unemployment rate was still 9.7%, even though the economy had added 162,000 jobs that month. The unofficial full unemployment rate, the one that includes discouraged workers who have stopped looking for jobs and those who have found part-time work but really want to work full time, actually went up in March, to 16.9%, from 16.8% in February...

The number of workers out of work for 27 weeks or longer climbed in March to 6.5 million from 6.1 million in February. That means that 44.1% of all the unemployed have been out of work for half a year or more.That's the highest percentage since the government began keeping records in 1948. The extraordinarily high percentage of long-term unemployed isn't just a feature of this recession.

...long-term unemployment has been rising over the past 10 years and that the recent recession only continues a trend visible in the recession of 2001 as well. One-quarter of the long-term unemployed leave the work force permanently, a Congressional Budget Office study found...

Personal income rose just 0.1% in February. Real disposable personal income grew by the same 0.1% in February...stocks are up 80% off the March 2009 bottom, but investors are still looking at a Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU) that was at 10,500 a decade ago and stands around 11,000 today. That's a gain of about 5% in 10 years.

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