Friday, October 16, 2009

Florida's Jobless Rate Spikes to 11%

According to the Jacksonville Observer, the unemployment rate in Florida has now breached the 11% mark.

It is the highest unemployment rate for the sunshine state since 1975, and it's up over 4 percentage points in the one year since September 2008.

Fort Walton Beach, Gainesville and Tallahassee – regions known for government, education and military employment – had the lowest unemployment rates, all less than 7.5 percent.

Friday, October 2, 2009

U6 Unemployment Tops 17%

This morning the Bureau of Economic Analysis put out data concerning the unemployment rate for the United States during September 2009. The reported unemployment rate climbed to 9.8% in the most recent month, and the broader total unemployment (aka the U6 Unemployment) climbed to 17%--this figure includes people who are working part time for economic reasons.

EconomPicData does a great job of plotting all types of economic data and today I'm pulling a nice chart that he created that shows just how tightly correlated the Unemployment rate and the U-6 Unemployment rate are.Another disturbing trend that EconomPicData picks up on is the fact that the number of hours worked per week times the # of people employed divided by the population (essentially the number of hours per week worked per capital). And what is disturbing is that it is at a multi-decade low and still dropping; additionally, before companies start hiring new workers they usually start increasing the number of hours worked by their existing work-force.