jobless claims

The Case for a V-shaped Jobs Recovery

It is almost universally received wisdom that when the turn comes, we will have a "jobless recovery" where GDP turns up anemically, but unemployment stubbornly rises. Indeed the most controversial notion in some parts of the econoblogosphere is that of the "jobless recovery." as in, can it truly be a "recovery" if the number of jobless Americans continues to increase? Much moreso than dry GDP figures, wages and employment are what matter to the average American. I too have generally accepted the idea that any GDP recovery would be jobless, such that in April I made a graph showing what an unemployment spike will look like if the recession bottoms this summer, but a "jobless recovery" similar to 1991 and 2001 ensues:

Recession watch: retail sales, new jobless claims rolling over

One of the things I wanted to try here is to post bits of significant economic data that would scroll off the page on the great orange satan in about 10 minutes. One of those items was yesterday's retail sales number. For about the last 6 months, most economic data has been deteriorating steadily, but two of the holdouts were retail sales and jobs data. A couple of weeks ago the December nonfarm payroll number finally went negative.

NonFarm Payroll