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US Jobless Rate Surpasses 10% to Hit 26-Year High
America's rate of unemployment crossed the 10 per cent mark in October to reach a 26-year high after jobless figures rose by 190,000 last month.
Jobseekers line up before dawn to register at a community employment center in October in Pasadena, California. (AFP/File/Robyn Beck) The non-farm payroll figure is above forecasts that 176,000 jobs had been lost last month. The rate of unemployment in America is now 10.2 per cent -- the highest since April 1983. The Dow Jones industrial average fell by 45.5 points to 9,960.46.
While October's job losses are above expectations, the total is below the 219,000 cuts recorded in September.
Today's data is being closely watched for signs that America can sustain a recovery without Government stimuli after emerging from recession in the third quarter.
Last week, figures revealed that US gross domestic product (GDP) - a key measure of an economy's financial health - rose by 3.5 per cent between July and September.
In February, President Obama signed a $787 billion recovery package, aimed at boosting growth and stemming job losses, which last week, the administration said was responsible for saving or creating about 640,000 jobs.
This week, the US Federal Reserve, America's central bank, underlined the fragility of the recovery when it voted to keep the interest rate at close to zero and indicated that there would be no increase for at least six months.
Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed people has risen by 8.2 million, and the unemployment rate has grown by 5.3 percentage points.
The largest job losses in October were in construction, manufacturing, and retail trade.
US employers are not expected to start adding jobs in significant numbers for several months with many sceptical about the strength and sustainability of the recovery. One of the biggest positive contributions to employment in October came from temporary employment, which added 34,000 extra jobs.
Paul Ashworth, senior US economist at Capital Economics, a research house, said: "Temporary jobs aren't the type of positions that you want to see being created in an economy further into a recovery. But at this early stage of the cycle, that rebound in temporary jobs suggests employers will be adding extra permanent positions over the next few months."
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19 Comments so far
Show AllIn addition to the never-ending list of this administration's sins add its failure to return labor statistics and reporting to its pre-Reagan parameters.
Aming other things, Reagan instituted the concept that people out of work for more than six months are no longer seeking a job, a bald-faced lie if there ever was one. This little trick keeps the "official" unemployment figures lower - even remarkably lower - than they should be.
Unemployment in the US has reached Depression-era levels and the working class folks know so even if our corporate government won't admit it.
q
So true quickstepper. As you know, there are lies, damned lies and statistics.
I teach job related skills to unemployed people and sometimes I wonder why. There are fewer and fewer jobs available for more and more people. Go to a job fair and see the desperate crowds and the overwhelmed HR people in the booths. I have heard the statistic that there are six applicants for every job opening. I'll bet it's even worse than that.
Joe
REAL unemployment is at least 18 percent if you count without fibbing. But there are so many "underworkers" that have had their hours cut back and so many jobs where the pay is so crumby it's just about like being unemployed. And what about all those government jobs? It seem to me like all the new jobs are government workers or military sub-contractors.
Are those REAL jobs? Do they produce anything (besides misery all over the world) of a tangible nature? We long ago quit reporting GNP in favor of GDP because there isn't any GNP anymore. We don't make anything anymore that anyone wants. So then we became a "Service" economy they told me, but then they exported all those jobs to India and China too, to kill labor contracts. Then we were a "Consumer" economy I was told. How's that going to work out without any consumers? What's the next big lie? How about a "Shellgame economy" where you keep bundling debt and pretend it's assets to trade?
Over a hundred banks have bit the dust, yet the printing presses never stop in this so-called "recovery". The private bankers at the Fed are getting rich, but we aren't. We better hope this economy never recovers, otherwise inflation is going to shoot up over 20 percent when all this fake money starts being circulated. The CPI is fake, the unemployment numbers are phony, why don't we just save time and space at CD and just print the few things that the government doesn't lie about? Is there anything?
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
LETS PLAY CONNECT THE DOTS:
1. Unemployment at 26 year high.
2. Unemployed cannot afford to meet expenses.
3. Credit card companies raise rates to 30%.
4. Large numbers of people buy using credit cards.
5. Speculators bundle and sell the debt.
6. Stock market goes up.
7. Large number of people default.
8. Bubble bursts.
9. Taxpayers bail out banks.
10. Layoffs continue.
11. Return to point 1 and insert another scam in point 3. We have already done housing and credit cards - so perhaps car loans, water rights or futures on human kidney donations.
Joe
Hi Joe,
Dave Cohen of ASPO-USA wrote a couple of essays, "The Decline of the American Empire," where he describes and illustrates what you listed--"Futility's Viscious Circle," http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2009/06/the-decline-of-the-american-empire/ for the first installment and http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2009/11/decline-of-the-empire-now-what/ for the most recent update.
Another writer seldom cited here who hits a homer with his analysis is Kevin Phillips, whom Cohen cites often in his essays. Then there are other important "establishment" figures he cites that shows some segment of the elite do understand what is happening, but who are nevertheless ignored even as the crisis deepens.
Here's the link to Shadowstats Alternative data that provides a better picture of the situation (Dave's essays also have some very good graphs that paint an ugly picture), http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data Note that un- and underemployment is just over 22%, which in our labaor market of 200 Million means 44+ Million un- and underemployed. That just about equals the 1/3 number FDR used in his One Third of a Nation Ill-Fed, Ill-Housed, and Ill-Clothed Second Inagural Speech that was meant to spur congress and the USSC into further actions to solve the Great Depression.
Because of the futility cycle, as Dave points-out, the situation is going to get worse, likely much worse.
excellent list, joe...I continue to be amazed at plans being laid that rely on tax monies...certainly, tax revenue will drop as more and more go jobless, or trade down in their wages...
We exist within the troubled world of private ownership of property...we must stop allowing the possession of land to be the foundation of wealth...
We must stop viewing birth as a plunge into lifelong debt simply for the necessities required to live...
We must stop viewing bankruptcy and homelessness as the precursors to ostracization, incarceration or suicide...
We must stop viewing death as the long-awaited beginning of deserved justice and peace...
We must stop living as if observing and doing are one and the same...
I know, I know...nobody needs more lists on a Friday...
Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...local, acoustic, agrarian living...individual engagement with one's own survival and sustenance...
What ever happened to creating real jobs, green jobs? Van Jones, where are you?
Joe
Didn't Obama banish him? At this point, why not just get government out of the way and allow the green entrepreneurs to grow green?
VJ was banished. But he did good things before his brief fling with Obama and I hope he will do them afterwards.
Joe
oh -- it's AMERICA !
there is no such thing outside of "LEAVE IT TO THE WISDOM OF THE MARKET".....
yeaaaaa.....
Rush Limbaugh has a massive following amongst the Corporate"White" Elite......When they heard his, "I want this man to fail," the Elite started outsourcing as many jobs as they could.
As I tried to extend my Alamo car rental agreement, I was cycled through India for 90 minutes before speaking with someone in the Miami office and then she cycled me back to India..........Now, I just got off the phone trying dispute the Alamo charges with my Chase Mastercard and I was cycled to the Phillipines to speak with someone who could not understand my English.
How about me trying to help a friend setup her Dell Computer, I was talking to India again and it took us 45 minutes of negotiated English. That happened with my HP computer too......
So, how many white collar jobs have been outsourced and how many factory jobs????For every job that has been outsourced, the American companies should be taxed a minimum of $3,000.
140,000 mercenaries are still employed not only by DOD, but by the State Department as well.....
Unless factories are being built and factory jobs created, The United States will never recover and Obama is a one term president......
Generals Lemnitzer and LeMay had wanted a pre-emptive nuclear attack during the Kennedy Administration. ("JFK, The Unspeakable" by James W Douglass).....Perhaps Iran and Pakistan should be concerned with our Right Wing and their ability to infiltrate all levels of government and political parties.
If the official unemployment is at 10.2%, then wouldn't the unofficial percentage be at least 20%?
It's over 22% as I noted earlier.
We've reached a tipping point; there will be no recovery-wealth updrafted as the population grows insures this.
It's over, we're beyond the precipice, falling towards The Revolution.
Within 30 years. Goodbye America as we know it.
As Bachman-Turner Overdrive sang:
You ain't seen nothin' yet...
Where've you been, azjoe? Within 30 years? We lost it long ago. Long ago.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
The rest of the developed world is leaving our 19th century, fossil fool nation in the dust when it comes to environmental sustainability, green tech and green jobs. Over the next 10 to 15 years this, plus the rest of our fiscal insanity, will reduce the U.S. to a big pouty pre-adolescent 2nd or 3rd World nation as far as the rest of the world is concerned. We will no longer be able to afford the overly privatized global military empire we have now. Less and less people in the world will pay any attention to us except to marvel at how we grovel for all the foreign tourist money while they gawk at the splendid ruins of our monuments to the past. That will be in the boutique areas not undergoing bloody balkanization and post-posse comitatus/sound cannon/snatch & grab military suppression like we saw at the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh.
There's big wind farm project underway in George Duhhbya Bush's second State of Texas. ALL the wind turbines for that project will be built in China and the project itself will be financed through Chinese banks. Behold the future. Of the ten largest manufacturers of high-tech wind turbines in the world only one is in the U.S. Of the ten largest manufacturers of solar arrays and photo-voltaics only two are in the U.S. Of all the world's manufacturers of energy conserving CFL lightbulbs, NONE of them are in the U.S. And the U.S. pioneered all these technologies. The EU is planning a massive North African wind farm to supply power to the Middle East and parts of the EU--the sort of thing that might actually help win a few hearts & minds in the Middle East, but he U.S. ain't doing it. Japan has another such massive energy farm planned in Africa to power countries to the East.
The Chinese will surpass the U.S. in both wind and solar technology research & development AND manufacturing in 2 years.
Our green technological lead is fading fast because of the century old lock that the fossil fuel industries have on Congress and the White House. That archaic lobby sees the only jobs program as volunteer military enlistment to fight more oil/pipeline wars for them--which will only worsen our fiscal imbalances until the entire empire implodes overnight like the Soviet Union. We could develop existing and enhanced geo-thermal energy to power all our electricity needs for an estimated 35,000 years. But we still have influential Republicans in Congress declaring global warming a hoax and relying on oil companies and munitions titans to "go out and git it!"
China is doing more to reforest the world than the U.S. is by requiring that every Chinese citizen from the age of 5 up plant three trees a year every year. The U.S. HAD a jobs program that did that and planted a billion trees. It was called the Civilian Conservation Corps. But that was between 1933 and 1940. For bold American vision for the future we can look only with fading memories to decades past. Even if we implemented just the New Deal jobs programs and raised taxes on the very rich as FDR did we would be in much better shape than we are now. FDR had the CCC up and running within 6 weeks of taking office in his first term. Obama might as well be in cryogenic suspension.
0bama did not sign a "$787 billion recovery package"
Let's drop the advertising language when we discuss these things. As Scott Adams might say, let's drop the weasel-words. 0bama signed a bill to give 800 billion dollars to his sponsors and put it on the tab of American taxpayers.
Otherwise, those of you who are losing your houses would have re-negotiated mortgages. Those who are losing their jobs would find your businesses supported, your expenses covered, green jobs available, funds for retraining, or something similar.
Any counterexamples out there?
Even when 0 & minions did bail GM, they insisted that GM break its contracts with its unions, but allowed GM to seed its factories abroad.
This is all very relevant in a discussion of unemployment. Frean makes excellent points, but adopting the Administrations weasel-words maintains that durable myth that 0bama or someone in his Ship of Fools is on our side.
This has already proven an awfully dangerous notion.
Bernanke said unemployment would not go above ten percent.
Bernanke said.