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Jobs

Double-Digit Unemployment… Just How Lagging Is It?

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

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The Labor Department has just reported the unemployment rate and non-farm payrolls data for October.  It isn’t pretty.  The unemployment rate screamed up into the double-digit territory to 10.2%.  The non-Farm Payrolls shrank by a reading of -190,000 versus estimates of -175,000 as the consensus figure.

There was a gain of 0.3% in Average Hourly Earnings.  The losses in jobs were in most sectors in construction, manufacturing, retail, leisure, and hospitality.  There were small gains seen in education and healthcare, but there was actually a small gain in professional services jobs.

We noted earlier this week that it seemed like the Obama administration was telegraphing a weaker bias on jobs.  Turns out that was the case.  And then some. It would be interesting to ask the newly unemployed and those who have been perpetually unemployed with no jobs prospects just how lagging of an economic indicator a 10%+ official unemployment rate is…. let alone the nearly 17.5% total if you include the temporary and underemployed.
JON C. OGG

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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