The Sun's Financial Diary

The U.S. job market remains gloomy. Early this month, the government statistics showed that monthly unemployment rate surged to 15-year high last month. Today, the Labor Department says Americans who file for new jobless insurance claims rose 30,000 for the week ending December 20, 2008, to reach 586,000, the highest level since November 1982. The [...]

U.S. Labor Department released monthly unemployment data for November 2008 and it’s not a pretty picture: the monthly unemployment rate reached a 15-year high of 6.7% in November. The last time when monthly unemployment rate was this high was September 1993. According to the report,  U.S. employers eliminated 533,000 non-farm positions last month, followed by [...]

The Commerce Department released revised quarterly GDP data yesterday, showing that the nation’s economy contracted in the third quarter. The 0.5% annual decline in domestic gross product from July to September is worse than the initially estimated 0.3% and it’s the severest since the third quarter of 2001 when the economy shrank 1.4%. Since the [...]

Yesterday, the government announced that in employers shed more than 85,000 jobs in August. That’s the eighth monthly job loss in a row. Though historically, the unemployment rate now is nowhere near the level in the early 90s (the chart below is the historical monthly unemployment rate since 1990), last month’s 6.1% unemployment rate is [...]