Hoping for change? The evidence now indicates that youth unemployment in America has now surpassed Europe and other developed countries, marking a stark turnaround from previous trends. The United States has become a land of diminishing opportunity for the young. For all of Europe’s troubles — a left-right combination of sclerotic labor markets and austerity [...]

The story of robotics replacing workers in manufacturing is nothing new but now it seems that robots are moving into the once unthinkable sector of service jobs. The kind of work some previously thought only humans could do. If you meet Baxter, the latest humanoid robot from Rethink Robotics – you should get comfortable with [...]

Speaker John Boehner might want to take a word of advice from Speaker John Boehner because according to him there is no immediate crisis. In an interview with ABC News Speaker Boehner admitted that, contrary to much of his and his party’s rhetoric, there actually is not a debt crisis. Martha Raddatz: Is [President Obama] [...]

I touched on this yesterday, but with the release of the Federal Reserve’s economic projections, we can say just what a catastrophe the past several years of policymaking has been. Here’s Paul Krugman: What struck me is that the Fed expects the unemployment rate to be well above its long-run level even in the fourth [...]

The good news is that the Federal Reserve vowed to keep interest rates low until unemployment fell below 6.5%. The bad news is that they implied it would take until 2015 to get there. And it will take that long, if we continue to pull back on fiscal policy in the middle of a lukewarm [...]

Fiscal slope talks have progressed, according to multiple news reports. Nobody’s talking details, which tea leaf-readers are taking as a sign of advancement (I wouldn’t be so sure of that, it seems more like standard back-room negotiating practice). But we do know that both sides are talking. What could they be talking about? Well, we [...]

This chart, which plots consumer confidence against incidences of news stories about the fiscal slope, finally shows the consumer affected by the uncertainty and fear from Congressional action (or lack thereof) tanking the economy. Since the summer, the consumer has been buoyed by a number of factors, including a recovery in housing prices and incremental [...]

As we gaze at today’s payroll report, it’s worth pointing out how government policies have improved the numbers in relative terms. Not by putting more people back to work, but by putting more people into the uncounted shadows: During a press conference demanding unemployment insurance be part of a fiscal cliff deal, Chuck Schumer noted [...]

The US economy proved surprisingly resilient in preliminary November job numbers, despite the effects of Hurricane Sandy, posting a gain of 146,000 jobs, and a drop in the topline unemployment rate to 7.7%. However, because of Sandy we should expect substantial revision to the numbers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that their survey response [...]

It goes without saying that you should not weep for the banking industry. In the years following a Great Recession they caused, they still manage to churn out record profits. This is the 13th straight quarterly rise in profits for financial institutions. The industry’s third-quarter earnings jumped 6.6% from the same period in 2011, to [...]

Not to harp on Raul Grijalva, but his media critique in this op-ed is spot-on, even if you strip away the partisan lens through which he frames this. The real story is that we have a jobs shortage crisis in this country, and Republicans haven’t lifted a finger to help. Democrats have put up the [...]