Just because the government crunched numbers and the result came out positive means we are all better off? None of the 15.7 million unemployed Americans is thinking the recession (Great or otherwise) is over. ... Read the full post ... Read more

Millions of out of work Americans may wish that they lived in North Dakota, no matter how harsh the winters can be. The state had an unemployment rate of only 4.2% compared to the 9.5% national figure. It is easy to dismiss the North Dakota job success as a by-product of the state’s low population ... Read more

The weekly jobless claims data is out and we have a second week of coming below that 600,000 mark.  The new figure is down 47,000 to a level of 522,000.  The reading of 565,000 originally reported last week was revised higher by 4,000 jobs to 569,000.  Bloomberg had a consensus estima ... Read more

Given that the Fed's first mission is to delay, confuse, hope, and otherwise attempt to buy time while engaging in wishful thinking along the way, that Bernanke is willing to admit this may be a jobless recovery is a sign that things will likely be at least that bad. In other words, prepare for a jo ... Read more

The Labor Department has just released its weekly jobless claims data at 621,000.  The prior week’s reading was revised to 625,000 from a prior reading of 623,000.  The consensus estimates from Bloomberg were for a reading of 620,000 for this week’s data.  This data is too in-line ... Read more

Weekly Jobless Claims just came out from the Labor Department and the most recent data shows a drop of 13,000 on a revised basis to 623,000.  The data from the week before was revised to 636,000 from 631,000. The notion that these are coming in above the 600,000 mark is only adding to the conti ... Read more

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released a report today on employment and unemployment for February (pdf summary available at   http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm ). The unemployment rate rose from 7.6% to 8.1% in February, the highest rate in over 25 years. ... Read the fu ... Read more

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's blog has an interesting graph of What 3.6 Million Jobs Lost Over 13 Months Looks Like. This chart compares the job loss so far in this recession to job losses in the 1990-1991 recession and the 2001 recession – showing how dramatic and unprecedented the job loss over ... Read more

Here are a couple of quotes that are making the rounds: "Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package 500 million Americans lose their jobs." Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi Obviously she meant 500 thousand (she corrected herself later). And it appears likely that anoth ... Read more

From MarketWatch: Macy's cutting 4% of workforce, quarterly dividend Macy's ... said Monday ... it will slash 7,000 jobs [and] reduced its 2009 capital expenditures budget to about $450 million ... It was just last November that Macy's cut their 2009 capital spending plans from $1 billion to $550 ... Read more