I already posted about today’s employment estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed that the U.S. economy added a fairly healthy 171,000 jobs in October and that the unemployment rate ticked up to 7.9 percent with an increased labor force participation rate.
In this post, just a few graphs.
From the BLS:
As I’ve said many times before, we’d all like to see these graphs looking stronger, but there was really no plausible scenario for that to happen given the dynamics of the financial crisis, the housing bust, and the collapse in new construction. More stimulus efforts from governments at all levels would have helped, for sure, but any serious effort was politically impossible.
From Calculated Risk:
Note that the unemployment rate decline looks far more rapid in the long sweep of this graph:
And here’s how much worse the 2007-2009 recession was than previous ones, and how far we still have to go:
