The Fed of San Francisco just published a note on Okun’s Law and the Unemployment Surprise of 2009.
In the paper they conclude that strong productivity was the main reason employment growth was weaker than the traditional relationship that Okun’s law…
Zacks.com submits:
Though the economy is showing signs of a gradual recovery, tumbling home prices, soaring loan defaults and rising unemployment continue to take their toll on small banks. As a result, U.S. regulators on Friday shuttered four more banks in…
From the American Bankruptcy Institute: February Consumer Bankruptcy Filings up 14 Percent over Last Year
The 111,693 consumer bankruptcies filed in February represented a 14 percent increase nationwide over the 98,344 filings recorded in February 2009, according to the American Bankruptcy…
Scroll down for a summary of last week and a look ahread (or click here).
First, via NPR: The Super Bowl Stock Market Predictor
The Super Bowl Stock Market Predictor holds that if a team from the old NFL wins, the market…
In the survey I asked members to provide their hopes and fears for the year ahead.
To provide you a good idea of how members replied to these questions, I created two word clouds (larger text shows which things were mentioned…
This looks like an incredibly bullish report at first glance. No, you’re not reading that incorrectly. The U.S. economy lost just 11,000 jobs in November and unemployment fell to 10%.
Update 1 – For the first time in years the dollar…
The Shrill One (tm – Brad DeLong) as Optimist:
The result, then, will be high unemployment leading into the 2010 elections, and corresponding Democratic losses. These losses will be worse because Obama, by pursuing a uniformly pro-banker policy without even a…
Gerard Jackson submits:
The same media types who screamed blue murder with undisguised glee when unemployment hit 5 per cent under Bush are now telling us that the current 10.2 per cent rate is being driven by rising productivity and so there…
Howard Richman submits:
The above graph shows the latest manufacturing employment numbers. Unemployment overall went up from 9.7% in August to 9.8% in September while non-farm employment declined by another 263,000 jobs in September. There is absolutely no evidence of a recovery…
A quote from Bloomberg: Strauss-Kahn Says Crisis Consequences Will Last Long Time
“We will still have rising unemployment at least for a year,” [International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique] Strauss-Kahn said via videolink in an address to the Yalta European Strategy…