http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25264866
Easily recognizable from the title, this article discusses the unemployment rate and celebrates the fact that it is at the lowest point within the last five years.
Other things to celebrate include the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching nearly 200 points, the 203,000 jobs that were created, and the non-farm payroll figures were even higher than expected. All through the economy it is evident that we have been seeing growth, and citizens and economists can only hope that it will continue.
Because of such growth, Ben Bernanke hopes to end the quantitive easing program supported by the US central bank. In addition to this, the Federal Reserve might begin to release their huge stimulus program. As Bernanke said in June during a press conference, he hopes that the growth will motivate and encourage further job gains with all of the other gains the economy is currently seeing.
In my opinion, I think that a lot of people are seeing these statistics about the unemployment decreasing and not realizing these statistics have a good chance of being skewed due to the government shutdown. Many statistics disregarded government personnel and payrolls, so therefore, can the statistics even legitimately represent accurate unemployment figures? Probably not.
However, if people see that the economy is growing and see the skewed statistics to prove it, that may encourage them to continue working towards growth even more, stimulating the economy even further as a result. While the inaccurate statistics can be seen as a negative thing, they may impact the economy in a positive way.
Discouraged workers aren't considered in the unemployment rate. Food for thought. But I agree, if people think the economy is growing significantly, maybe it will boost consumer confidence?
ReplyDeleteIt is very possible that the public responds to unemployment rates a bit too irrationally. Let's be honest, the "official" unemployment rate does not tell the full story behind the true amount of people out of work in the country. However, I do believe that seeing the rate fall does motivate people a little bit more. So, if these figures are what the public needs, the hopefully they continue to go into a promising direction.
ReplyDeleteYeah, like David stated, discouraged workers aren't counted, so although its seems like the joblessness went down, in reality, the discouraged workers probably went up.
ReplyDeleteDiscouraged workers don't count in unemployment rates. We don't actually know who actually got a job and who gave up on looking for one. It's not that easy to measure unemployment rate.
ReplyDeleteI obviously agree with what is said about discouraged workers above but I really don't think that the "huge" stimulus package will really do as much as people may believe. We all learned that the market is always going up and down and that it is always going to straighten itself out, so I don't really know why everyone thinks that we can fix the market all by ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the missing government workers from the statistics is not a huge problem. They don't make up that much of the work force and the way they are payed is different because of how the entity that pays them obtains its money.
ReplyDeleteLike Thao said the discourage workers don't count in the unemployment rate so the numbers are skewed anyways. These number sound great but we really can't be sure what they are actually like because of people always leaving and entering the labor force. Maybe though articles like this one will give people more hope to start looking for a job.
ReplyDeleteJust as David said, discouraged workers do not count in the labor force. We talked about this in class and i believe we came to the agreement that the reason for unemployed workers decreasing is simply due to the fact that people are getting discouraged which means they're dropping out of the labor force.
ReplyDeleteJust like everyone has been saying and like we learned in class discouraged workers are not included in the unemployment rate. So, when you hear the unemployment rate is going down the initial thought it that is good but it really isn't good if the unemployment rate is going down because more unemployed workers are becoming discouraged instead of getting jobs.
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