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Unemployment is worse than it looks

By RecessionALERT on May 21, 2019 in Reflections

The U.S civilian unemployment rate reached new lows of 3.6% in April – numbers last seen 51 years ago in 1968: There are a number of ways to use the national unemployment rate to signal recession, but almost all of them are co-incident to slightly lagging in the warning they provide. We have the most commonly used method which is annual growth of the unemployment rate, which has provided about six false positives since 1950 and can lag on occasion […]

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Unemployment more widespread than thought

By RecessionALERT on August 22, 2016 in Reflections

The Total Non-farm Payrolls data made another solid print for the month of July 2016, leading to the assumption that all is good with employment in the U.S: Similarly, if we examine the countrywide Civilian Unemployment Rate, we also get reassuring signs: However, if we dig deeper and examine the per-state unemployment rates for 52 U.S states from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a very different picture emerges: The average state unemployment rate seems to be putting in a bottom, […]

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Over 30% of States with rising unemployment

By RecessionALERT on April 18, 2016 in Reflections

The March 2016 figures are in for state-wide unemployment and the percentage of states with growing unemployment has risen to over 30% now: The useful thing with this breadth metric is that deterioration in unemployment is made visible long before it shows up in the average national unemployment rate. Whereas the national unemployment rate is at best a co-incident indicator for recession, the percentage of states with increasing employment acts as a reliable leading indicator – reliable enough to be […]

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Animation : The incredible US employment recovery

By RecessionALERT on April 7, 2016 in Reflections

Below is an animation of the annual average unemployment rate per U.S state from 2011 onward. It’s quite incredible to see how unemployment was erased state-by-state over the years: However statewide improvements in employment have probably peaked-out as shown in the chart below, which depicts the aggregate (equal weighted) inverse 6-month unemployment rate growth for each of the 52 U.S States together with a diffusion showing the percentage of 52 U.S states with increasing unemployment. You can see that recently […]

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