42 months after U.S. payrolls bottomed out, the economy still hasn’t recovered all 8.7 million jobs wiped out in the Great Recession — the longest and slowest recovery in the postwar era.
Much has changed for African-Americans since the 1963 March on Washington (which, recall, was a march for “Jobs and Freedom”), but one thing hasn’t: The unemployment rate among blacks is still about double that among whites, as it has been for most of the past six decades.
Every month when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its jobs report, people home in on one particular metric: the unemployment rate. But there are a lot of other interesting and potentially significant data in the report, though interpreting them appropriately can be tricky. Take, for example, the duration of unemployment. There’s little doubt that more […]
Continued high unemployment in Europe is fueling the debate over whether it is now time to stimulate the economy to spur job creation or to continue fiscal retrenchment to cut public debt.
The unemployment rate stood at 7.6% when Obama took office; its rise, and the corresponding fall in Obama’s approval rating, so far mirrors Reagan’s first term.