“The unemployment rate in the U.S. soared to a 26-year high of 10.2 percent in October and employers cut more jobs than forecast, underscoring why Federal Reserve policy makers say interest rates will remain near zero.”
∙ Unemployment in U.S. Jumps to 10.2%, Payrolls Fall [Bloomberg]
∙ San Francisco County Unemployment At 9.7 Percent In September [SocketSite]
Your headline uses unemployment figures from two different months to get “five tenths above SF” If you’re going to use two different months, you could just as easily make the headline “4.0% above SF”
[Editor’s Note: Good point, but unfortunately October counts for San Francisco won’t be out for a couple of weeks, and we only have so much room for the headlines, but that’s exactly why we included the reference link(s).]
According to the NYTIMES The official jobless rate IS 17.5% AND excludes millions of people who have given up looking for work and part-time workers who want to be working full time.
Link please REHAWK. Let’s compare apples to apples when looking at unemployment rates.
I think the BLS has about 6 different “official” measures of unemployment depending on how you define it. The 17.5% number is the broadest metric (U6), headline inflation is defined by U3.
That’s why I prefer labor force participation and total wage compensation as metrics.
NoeValleyJim, I think he’s referring to this article, which is a Reuters piece:
I agree with diemos, the 17.5 percent figure is probably the U6 measure.
The NYTimes article above is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/business/economy/07econ.html?scp=8&sq=jobless%20rate&st=cse
and indeed refers to the most recent U6, but what I *hate* is the times never actually *says* this, and they don’t provide the obvious link to the direct data (they provide lots of internal links to their own crap though):
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm
Note also U6 only goes back to 1994 — claims that this is an 80’s high is based on a “reconstructed version”.
The NY times wants you to think they are doing ground-breaking reporting, when all they are doing is looking up stuff on a public web site. This is of course why old media is going down the toilet, creating the four php jobs in SF that NoeValleyJim knows about.
They really should start reporting U2 instead — that would make folks feel better 🙂