Government Unemployment Projections way off the Mark.

Hat tip to Greg Mankiw for pointing out the fact that the federal government's forecasters have been way off the mark when projecting the unemployment rate both with and without the stimulus.

Click on Chart for a Larger View

The original government report published in January 2009 was either (1) overly optimistic with regards to the impact of the stimulus package around job creation or (2) Severely underestimated just how bad the "Great Recession" is turning out to be.

The original worst cast assumption was for the unemployment rate to be ~9%---Now it's likely that the statistic will breach 10% by July, 2009... That's a huge margin of error for only 6 months in the future from the reports publish date---makes you wonder what their confidence interval is for 2014!