Unemployment

A protracted partisan skirmish has left hundreds of thousands of Americans without unemployment benefits — an impasse Senate Democrats hope to break this week.

With only a week left in the Bush presidency, The Atlantic offers a illustrated look at what the last eight years have brought. While some changes aren’t surprising — Apple profits up, Big 3 automaker profits down; electricity costs up, personal savings rate down — others are a bit less obvious. Like the doubling of [...]

Leave it to a state in the middle of the continent, where extremes of any kind (except weather) are frowned upon, to reassure the world that the country’s current joblessness is right where it should be — at the median for postwar recessions. The Economist trumpets that news based on a Federal Reserve Bank of [...]

Outside North Minneapolis’ River of Life Church, an official polling place, a discarded copy of The Final Call newspaper this morning suggests one possible reason record numbers of voters, including many first-timers, are expected to hit the polls today. See MnIndy’s Election Day Flickr pool here.
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There’s the old adage that things will get worse before they get better, or that something must hit rock bottom before bouncing back. And pundits and economists and analysts have been sounding the alarm bell for months: The economic downturn is only in Stage 1 collapse. On Tuesday, chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association Jay Brinkman warned industry folks that the mortgage crisis could last well beyond 2009, and added that the MBA is forecasting unemployment will rise to 7.8 percent by early 2010 before more jobs are added.

Over the weekend, Floyd Norris of the NYT took a look at the seldom-mentioned difference between official government unemployment figures and the real numbers of jobless Americans. The former are for the most part those who are recently unemployed and still in the system; the latter counts those who are still without work but have [...]