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This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
Hard on the heels of yesterday’s Latvian GDP numbers we now have news that Estonia’s economy shrank at the slowest annual pace in a year at the end of 2009 as a modest recovery in exports and one-time stock-building helped offset the impact of the continuing [...]

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The past week saw a huge fall in the number of persons making an initial filing for jobless claims. The U.S. Department of Labor reported:
In the week ending Feb. 6, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 440,000, a decrease of 43,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 483,000. The 4-week moving [...]

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The Atlantic has an epic piece on employment trends in America in this month’s issue.  This is a must-read piece of journalism, not just for the anecdotes and analysis of this particular downturn, but also for its statistics and historical perspective. 
One particular part of the narrative on urban Black males caught my eye. You’ll [...]

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This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
Well, as we say in English, it never rains but it pours. Latvia, which has had the deepest recession of all 27 European Union member states, contracted by nearly 18 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009, when compared to the same period a year [...]

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John Mauldin’s latest is about spotting asset bubbles and the potential government policy response. But he also has a lot to say about the latest employment situation survey and the situation in Greece with an apt comparison to the U.S.
In this issue: A Bubble in Search of a Pin [...]

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Last week I showed you a chart from ProPublica in my post State unemployment insurance insolvency: 50 little Hoovers which demonstrated how states are being killed by the financial strains of unemployment insurance.  Well, this week ProPublica is back with more detail behind that chart – and, as you can imagine, it’s not exactly bullish.
They [...]

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A lot of people are questioning the unemployment rate of 9.7% in the face of a –20,000 non-farm payroll print.  How could we be losing jobs and have the unemployment rate drop? It would seem people are dropping out of the labor force.
However, I have now parsed the household survey data and most of [...]

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Those are the numbers. But this month’s unemployment rate and the non-farm payrolls number are less important this go round. The devil is in the details here because we have some major benchmark revisions and that means changes to historical data.  Bloomberg has a report out which says the government’s own statisticians have anticipated a [...]

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This past Monday I was on the BBC talking about the recently unveiled Fiscal Year 2011 Budget proposed by the Obama Administration for the U.S. Federal Government.  The budget is, as with most things Obama, a tightrope walk between the two ends of the political spectrum.  On the one hand, the President wants to be [...]

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This morning, I left just in time to see the U.S. Department of Labor’s jobless claims numbers for the preceding week.  They were not good.  Initial claims hit 480,000 for the week ending 30 Jan 2010, pushing the 4-week average up to 468,750. 

 
As a result of this news and sovereign debt issues in [...]