The real unemployment figure in the US is around 20%
 

Are you worried yet?

Who thinks the US is out of the woods?

The world over, we are in the eye of the storm, and it could easily get much worse before it gets better.

What do you think has happened to that Toxic Debt? It's STILL THERE. It wasn't written off. It doesn't just go away.

I predict trouble ahead.

Its not going to get fixed until people start getting jobs again.

Giving a bunch of banks a lot of money won't work on its own!

The Federal Reserve has an arsenal of ABC programs insuring no bank loses money.. using of course money that doesn't exist!

this shit is going to make Hurricane Katrina look like a water sprnkler of fun on a sunday afternoon

I don't think that the % is higher than about 11%. I think that a lot of people who were already unemployed from before got back in line and in the confusion got paid again.

The toxic debt is getting worked out. People are losing their homes, refi ing etc. The banks did write it off that was the reason for the huge losses. And don't listen to the hype. Toxic makes it sound like it is only going to get worse but real estate has already started to firm up and every few percent rise helps the "toxic debt".

I have heard the same thing regarding the real percentage being around 20% but I guess we will just have to wait and see what happens. Lots of unemployed people out there these days.

pretty hard to write off a debt. when you dont have a income, and the majority of the cashflow is from borrowed money

The real % has been up around 20% for like 20 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was higher than that.

The numbers that say 8% are only counting active claims. Once a person drops off unemployment and still doesn't have a job, they aren't part of that percentage - even though they have no job.


So right now we have like 8-10% 'CLAIMS' for unemployment. It has always been about double for the real number.


Things are bad, but they have been far worse.

The majority of the debt is borrowed debt... not cash flow. No actual cash or real money was ever exchanged.

It's very easy to write off debt that isn't real. You just scratch out one number and write in another.

It doesn't work like that.

Its worse than the numbers say.

I know several people that got laid off and when they use up the unemployment reserve allocated to them they can't collect anymore.. therefor dropping the unemployment numbers.

Also all us self-employed people who didn't pay unemployment insurance on ourselves don't count if our businesses tank.

A bunch of people who use to work full-time are now part-timers and that doesn,t count. etc. etc.

exactly :thumbsup

there is still an option ARMs debacle coming, starting next year. Too bad obama let the bank lobby gut the foreclosure bill.

good post

if you use the same statistical methods as thy used during the great depression we are near or at great depression unemployment levels.

green shoots my ass ....

Losing your house is about as bad as it gets short of catching a fatal disease or losing an important body part or three. Those folks are going to be fucked for the next seven years at a bare minimum and most of them will never catch up again.

The rat bastards who ran AIG, Bear Sterns, Lehman Bros et al are the ones who should be suffering.

In a perfect world those very same bastards would find themselves lined up infront of a firing squad, selected from the ranks of the recently unemployed :2 cents:

The global meltdown has not even started yet.

there might be some spots in the u.s. that are approaching 20%, like here in l.a. but the nation's overall unemployment figure isn't close to 20%

The hedge funds began this, and they started doing better in 1st quarter, allowing capital back in, etc. Banks were more profitable in the second quarter. The building industry is not losing cap any more. I'd say we've seen the bottom, but the recovery has no engine, so it will seem slow and grinding.

I've read that in a few places as well.

Someone else mentioned the ARMs that are about to reset. Things could get reeeal ugly when that happens.

Little wonder why sign ups aren't exactly flying off the charts this summer.

Unemployment numbers ALWAYS lag behind in a recovery. It takes awhile before employers are confident enough to start expanding their workforce again. So looking at the unemployment figures really isn't a good indicator in deciding whether or not you've hit bottom.

The best indicator of the start of recovery is consumer spending. Consumers could be spending NOW, they just, as a whole, haven't gotten over the psychological barrier that's keeping their money in their pocket. If you're still working and you didn't have 100% of your money in investments, then you still have the same cash you had before the bust. Start spending it.

Especially you lousy fuck executives who used to take $200 lunches, but now you brownbag it because "times are tough" and you want to appear like you care, though you're still getting paid millions. I don't begrudge you your pay, many of you earned it, but take those damn $200 lunches, our economy needs it!

What many wonder is where are these new decent paying jobs going to come from?

Manufacturing, as it has for decades, continues to move offshore ... so that's out.

Financials, including banks, already has too many people ... so that's out.

Accounting, while continue to grow, is easily, and increasingly, outsourced ... so that's out.

Computers / System Admin / Programming / Design, while indispensible, is easily outsourced ... so that's out.

Thus many new jobs will be ~$10 slave wage service jobs and warehouse workers ... but the future is likely even worse than that ... there simply won't be enough jobs, at any wage, for everyone who need them...

One stat that's telling is the net job growth was essentially zero in the past decade, and yet the U.S. population grew by around 30 million. And the next 10 years, even with reduced immigration, the population is likely still to grow by around 1% per year...

Which at current rates, equates to around a NET (after subtracting out retirees and deaths) 100,000+ NEW working age people entering the available workforce each month!

I don't see any new big thing on the horizon to turn that around - technology is played out; too easily outsourced anyways ... so, again, where will all these new decent paying jobs come from?

And lastly, while unemployment is often a (edit: lagging) indicator, it's likely not this time, because this is not an inventory based recession / depression, but rather is a debt based one, much like that of the 1930s depression.

Ron

problem is people here got lazy, they dont want to work, all they work on is excuses, tons of work out there but people just not motivated to hire as its too big of a problem lately.

In these statistics they should exclude those that never had and probably never will get a job... :1orglaugh

yup, you lend people money, they can't pay it back, and it becomes your fault? :error :1orglaugh

Thank the unions for a lot of that. Pricing ourselves out of the global market, while removing incentives for quality. :thumbsup

The unions didn't help any, but even without the unions everything would still have played out the same.

Think about it. Walmart pays more (a lot more) than autoworkers get in the third world. No way most of the good paying jobs would, or will, stay here unless you're talking about independent entrepreneurs or people with great service jobs.

Well, of course, two different standards of living between us and third world. You don't want jobs to go offshore, we either need to make a lot less money or they need to make a lot more. Only way for that is one world economy and I doubt many people want THAT. :1orglaugh

Or you have to legally prohibit American companies from outsourcing, and see above on that as well.

Domestic energy production (not repubs oil or dems green energy, both) will help

I won't get into a big thing about this because honestly I'm tired of having the same argument over and over and over again.

Bottom line is that the actual real number doesn't matter as much as that we calculate the number the same way every time so that we know if things are getting better or worse. (The same thing is true of inflation, which is another number people like to nitpick about, but that follows the same principle)

If the real number is 20 now instead of 10, then when the official number was 5, it was actually 10....so we still know it's twice as high as it used to be. That's the importance of the number....whether it is getting better or worse affects public policy, otherwise, unless you're a stats geek, it's pretty meaningless.
The only employment number that matters to the average joe is his own, and it's either 100% or 0%.

nowutimean?

i have two friends that are unemployed. they lost their jobs from companies shutting down, but they are collecting unemployment. I asked them if they have been looking for a job and their response was "fuck no, im collecting unemployment"

this after the gov't extended the time someone can collect unemployment... and we wonder why we are all fucked.

I know TONS of scumbags who do not WANT a job too. They are all called "unemployed"

I can also tell you for a fact that even though Las Vegas has a super high unemployment rate...there is absolutely no reason for anybody here not to have a job.

The service industry alone here could hire every person.

A lot of it is just like the health insurance bullshit. Not everybody WANTS insurance. And not everybody WANTS to have a job. And not everybody will work a job they don't want or feel is "beneath" them.

I think some of it too is just families shifting priorities. A friend of mine is married and has three kids. One of them is really young (4 yrs old). His wife had a full time job then got laid off when the company eliminated her position. She got on unemployment and about a month later found another job, but it was a contract/temp job. A few months later it ended. She continued to look, but she was only finding jobs that were going to pay $9-$11 an hour, which is better than nothing, but they also had to pay a full time babysitter for her to do that. They decided, in the end, it wasn't worth it. After the babysitter and gas to commute she would end up making about $4 an hour so they decided instead to just have her be a stay at home mom. Technically, she is unemployed and counts as being unemployed even though she has chose not to work right now.

Correct. If you know how the government calculated, manipulates the numbers it would have more people running scared. Right now the media and government are trying to sell a dream of rebounding.

http://www.numbersusa.com/content/nu...ment-rate.html

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

I've worked in both management and union shops, even as a union steward. They are stereotyped like a mofo and painted with a broad brush of bullshit.

If it were not for unions in the FIRST PLACE. You would still be working like for slave labor rates like they were in the 1800's and early 1900's. You should actually thank unions for a lot of what you (subjective to those in the real world jobs, not internet) take for granted today.

:2 cents:

:thumbsup:thumbsup

But yet you can "thank them" for a lot more for the recent events :winkwink::2 cents:

I think we'll see the real state of the economy this holiday season.

Yeah, the unemployment rate is a lot less than is being reported. I know a handful of people who fly under the radar, have full time jobs, under the table.

My dad has been a Personnel Manager at multiple companies, some union, some non-union. He's the lucky guy who gets to coordinate contract negotiations. Let me tell you, stereotypes happen for a reason. I'm not talking about most of the workers themselves, the good ones are just brainwashed by "that's how it's always been." I'm talking about high-level union management.

I'm in total agreement with your second paragraph, though you forgot to leave out that there are a whole host of federal regulations that make unions pretty much unnecessary now. Unions are outdated relics that remain only to extract money from both members and management.

Don't even get me started on Card Check.

No plan to.

Simply saying. I have been in union companies. I have also done union, and management for the SAME company.

I can say, even now, that no matter what you think of unions, management is 100 times worse. It is hard to justify union members take a pay cut, or cut their benefits when you award your CEO and board of directors 10's or 100's of millions of dollars every year in bonuses. Or when your advertisements are on every single Big Ten football game. Or endless other examples.

You can't expect a multimillion dollar company flaunting their money in the faces of the workers, and to keep paying their management and execs absolutely ludicrous pay hikes annually, or bazillions on their ad budgets, and not expect those at the bottom rung not to be asking for their piece of the pie?

Nigga please.

:2 cents:

This is in all of our futures....

http://a.imagehost.org/0215/Lord_Humungus.jpg

Not talking about multimillion dollar companies with multimillion per year CEOs, etc. I'm talking smaller than that, stuff like a regional airport. Union rules add so many layers of extra work that must be done for any little thing, etc. I should note, though, that your problem you detail above exists in BOTH union and non-union shops, so you can't say the union's FIXED that problem.

Anyway, you got your opinion, I got mine. I ain't going toe to toe with you on it. :1orglaugh

Agreed. There is no money in it.

Carry on.
:pimp

I think I know who you are now! Hit me up on icq mang!

thats not 100% true.. the govt allowed banks to shift toxic debt off their primary books, its still there, but the new accounting rules allowed them to shift that without taking an immediate loss..

i am trying to buy 2 foreclosures (triplex) from 2 separate banks and they didnt want to budge on the price..

fortunately for me, one is a freddie mac and they keep dropping the price $7k every 30 days, so hopefully i will get them both for less than my original offer...

There is a house across the street from me that is for sale by the bank. It was a foreclosure so it is just sitting there empty. They have had three different offers on it. Twice the people buying it got sick of for the bank. The bank accepted their offer and the process started. Two months later the bank still hasn't done anything they need to to so in two of the three cases the people just pulled the offer and bought another house. The third person made the offer and it was accepted then they are in a holding pattern. I spoke to the realtor about a month ago when I saw her out there mowing the lawn. She told me the story of the house. Since then the people haven't moved in so I assume the bank is stalling again.

So clearly they aren't in any big hurry to move these things off their books. If they were it would have been sold six months ago.

i know.. i am seeing similar things.. the banks don't seem to care and it makes me mad that when regular people get in trouble, the banks have the attitude of "liquidate your assets" yet they dont want to do the same..

in my case, the banks are going to ultimately take a much bigger loss than if they would have just sold to me to begin with at a bigger profit then they are going to get in the end..

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/14...ust_walk_away/

"Here's a terrible new twist to a housing meltdown tortured by too many of them. Banks are refusing to take possession of houses after the foreclosure process because of the prohibitive cost, from legal to maintenance fees, of being stuck with the same worthless mortgages with which they've saddled American homeowners...."