24/7 Wall St.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently released a report that says jobless rates will peak this year but that it will be many years before unemployment numbers reach the lows before the recession. There is no news in that.

What is new is that the mayors believe that unemployment in many cities will stay above 10% until 2013.

Reuters reports that unemployment was above 15% in 17 metro areas in November. This list matches fairly well with the one which the mayors presented. It is made up of the cities in the industrial Midwest, Florida, Southern California, and Nevada.

The projections tells a great deal about how intractable the jobless problems is the US. Workers with skills that are useful in the part of nation were they live will eventually find employment. Auto workers will no longer be able to find  jobs in Michigan and will have to relocate in the hope of finding employment.

There has been an exodus of people out of the central Midwest to large southern states like Texas. Job seekers believe that the grass is greener there, but the fact of the matter is that there are not enough jobs to go around anywhere.

Douglas A. McIntyre