Unemployment

There is absolutely NO urgency about unemployment.

Does Washington care about unemployment?

In 1983, Ronald Reagan's Washington regarded high unemployment as a national emergency. Today, with unemployment kissing 10 percent, Barack Obama's Washington scarcely seems perturbed. Why?

POSTED ON MAY 31, 2010, AT 12:39 PM

BRAD DELONG

U.S. Treasury bond prices leaped again in May. By the third week of the month, the 30-year Treasury bond sold for ten percent more than it had at the start of the month, a mark of the growing excess demand for safe, liquid, high-quality financial assets. As economist John Stuart Mill pointed out in the early 19th Century, excess demand for such assets inevitably means excess supply of something else -- “something else,” in this case, being the goods and services provided by workers. 

We have seen this dynamic at work since early fall, 2007, with growing excess demand for high-quality financial assets accompanied by growing excess supply of goods, services and workers. What happened in the bond market in May tells us that this excess supply of workers has just grown significantly larger. more

12 Charts That Show The REAL State Of Unemployment In America

Joe Weisenthal | Jun. 2, 2010, 7:06 AM | 10,016 | 5

All eyes this week are on this Friday's jobs report.

The market is expecting 500K jobs created, and an unemployment rate of 9.8%.

But while you're waiting for that, here's a quick survey of what the US employment situation really looks like, across various measures and industries.

The number of unemployed for a super long time is still a vertical line.

Image: http://research.stlouisfed.org 

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