The nation’s unemployment rate shot up to 6.4 percent in June, the highest level in more than nine years, in an economic slump that has added nearly a million people to jobless rolls in the past three months.
Businesses slashed 30,000 jobs in June for the fifth straight month, with cuts heavily concentrated in the nation’s factories, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
Not good. I hope this individual is right:
Because the government calculates the overall unemployment rate based on a survey of American households, and because the lackluster economy wasn’t producing enough jobs to accommodate an increasing number of jobseekers, that rate increased significantly.
“That suggests a combination of better prospects, getting the war behind us, a better stock market — just more enthusiasm about economic prospects — is causing people to re-enter the labor force,” Mayland said, adding that the jobless rate should start to stabilize.
“It would be my bet that we’re at the high-water mark,” he said.
Again, unemployment is a lagging indicator.
Emperor Misha I
It’s a good thing I never tried to hand in a paper with a manipulated graph like that or I’d have been unceremoniously flunked out on my ass.
Singling out a narrow interval and then blowing it up to poster size… Rather pathetic, in my opinion.
Andrew Lazarus
A better chart is available here. ( IMG tags don’t work in comments. )
Emperor Misha I
Yep, Lazarus, MUCH better. To be sure, it still blows up the interval, but it DOESN’T exclude everything else to the point where it looks like unemployment was invented around feb. ’01, having been an unknown to mankind before then.
That graph actually TELLS us something. Thanks for the link.
Russ
6.4%… bearing in mind, of course, that 5% is considered (in economist terms) to be “full employment.”
Of course, if you’re the unemployed person, the rate might as well be 100%.
Watcher
They actually used the phrase “shot up to 6.4%” to describe a 0.3% raise?
Mark L
Isn’t it a shame. Just when all of those shiny new college graduates start looking for a job and all of those high school students are trying to find summer work . . . the unemployment rate jumps.
Doesn’t seem quite fair, does it. Work four years for that diploma and the month you graduate the number of people looking for work skyrockets.
Maybe there is a connection. Think. What was it they said in that econ class — the lecture the day after that big party. Something about seasonal unemployment. Well, it will come eventually.