Noise and more noise. I’ll say it again, the only number that matters is the Labor Force Participation Rate, which for twenty months or more has been doing nothing but limping along at 30-year lows.
The article is only about the mechanics and charting of "...the number of initial unemployment insurance claims being filed each week..." These statistics are of limited to no use for those trying to understand the trouble this country is in.
What we need are charts showing Labor Force Participation or conversely, Labor Force Unemployment for the entire history of our country. And those rates must be calculated simply, not with all of the smoke and mirrors the government is using.
"Simply" means, total labor force versus total employed or total unemployed. Anything else is either meaningless or of narrow focus.
I expect that calculating "simply" will show we not only remain in recession but are very close to Great Depression numbers.
Exactly. The press expends a lot of ink discussing little blips in the supposed unemployment rate as it zig-zags from 8.1 to 7.9 as if its some kind of great improvement in the economy. When, since these people do not return to the work force, it actually traces an economy corkscrewing into the tarmac.