CBO: Long Term Unemployment Hit Record 40 Percent of All Unemployed in December


















From Director Douglas Elmendorf
Congressional Budget Office
February 2012

The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression.

Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014.

The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent.

Compounding the problem of high unemployment, the share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months—referred to as the long-term unemployed—topped 40 percent in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since.

See full report here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cathie Wood: The Big Risk Is Deflation, Not Inflation

The big risk ahead over the next five years is deflation, not inflation, and it will benefit investments in innovation strategies, according to Cathie Wood, founder and chief executive officer of Ark Invest. Robert England Innovator companies, who share prices have tumbled 30-35% from their heights earlier this year, are likely to return 25-30% in each of the next five years from their current levels, Wood is predicting. “In terms of the recent behavior of value stocks, especially those we believe are in harm’s way, compared to the severe draw down of innovation stocks, I like the set up very much,” Wood said.   While the current situation is reminiscent of the runup in prices from 2006 to 2008, the bond market is signaling that may not be the case, Wood said.    Instead of 10-year Treasury yields rising sharply higher as it did during the 2008 financial crisis, the bond market “has settled down” following a sharply higher move in yields earlier in the year on inflation f...
Read more

Crypto Index Funds Scramble to Win Over Hesitant Investors

Image
Hunter Horsley, chief executive officer of Bitwise Entrepreneurs believe that crypto index funds will greatly expand the crypto investor base just as the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000 indexes have done for stocks.   By Robert Stowe England As entrepreneurs look to take cryptocurrency mainstream, they’re copying a tried-and-trusted approach from traditional investing: indexing. Index investing is designed to generate returns that are similar to a broad market index. This approach can reduce the risk of picking individual assets which might underperform the broad market. So, in the case of an equity index,  instead of picking say Exxon, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, and Ford, for example, you invest in the broad market.  Several new crypto index products have launched recently, offering investors new avenues into the market without some of the risks associated with putting money into single blockchain projects.  Crypto indexers take their cu...
Read more

John B. Stetson in the Gilded Age: Sitting on Top of the World

Image
Portrait of John B. Stetson by Irwin Benoni, 1895. Credit: John B. Stetson Company. Chapter Eight Sitting on Top of the World  Note: This sample chapter is from the forthcoming book Stetson: An American Icon             After conquering the West, the rapid growth of John B. Stetson &   Company after 1880 propelled the company toward another accomplishment – becoming the largest hatter in the world. While there are no historic data on the number of hats sold for most of the 1880s and 1890s, available information on earnings growth sheds light on the company’s rapid ascent up the ranks of hat makers. Starting from a net annual profit of $70,136 in 1879, Stetson’s earnings more than doubled to $185,457 eight years later in 1887.         By 1890, profits were sharply higher at $332,624 on an estimated $1,330,000 in revenues.   Based partly on those revenues and its ever-expanding factory co...
Read more