Economic stuff

I'm no expert on economics, I studied anthropology in college, but I read the news daily and I follow a few financial blogs that are run by people that really know their stuff. They report in much finer detail than more general news sources like CNN, NPR, or BBC do. Below is a sort of summarization from a number of different sources.

Today the government announced the unemployment numbers for December. According to their statistics 85,000 jobs were lost last month. They also revised November from a loss to a gain and October from a gain to a loss. The official reported unemployment rate sits unchanged at 10% for December. That only includes people currently receiving unemployment benefits.

2.5 million people were "marginally attached" which means they are unemployed and have looked for a job in the last 12 months but not in the last 4 weeks. In December of 08 that number was 578,000 people. These people are not counted in the reported unemployment number or percentage.

Between November 09 and December 09, the number of people receiving "Emergency Unemployment Compensation" benefits rose from 3.594 million to 5.143 million people, a 43% increase. And, those people are not counted in the reported unemployment numbers either.

Officially, unemployment is 10%, Clearly though the number of people without jobs is massively higher and is closer to 20%.

Things are just as bad in Europe too. Take a look at this article at the NY Times. Unemployment in Latvia is over 22% and Spain is over 19% In Spain, people 25 and under are 43.8% unemployed.

This is a huge amount of data to digest but there are some very interesting details in it. The numbers are in a wonky format though, if you see 207,000 read it as 207 million and 4,100 is 4.1 million. That chart shows quarterly data from 1999-2009 in both raw and seasonally adjusted formats. Annual numbers are in the far right column.

At this time, 73.9% of people age 25 and over with a bachelors degree or higher are employed which is down from 78.5% in 1999. 65.5% of people age 25 and older with a bachelors degree are employed, down from a high of 72% in 1999. 56.1% of people age 25 and over with a high school diploma are employed, down from 62.6% in 1999. And only 39.7% of people age 25 and older who do not have high school diplomas are employed, down from a high of 43.3% in 2007.

Sources are:

http://www.zerohedge.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/

http://www.bls.gov/

http://market-ticker.denninger.net/

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

--Abe