I think I need a macro key for “Austerity doesn’t work,” because we got more indications of that today with respect to Europe. First, unemployment reached its highest level in the Eurozone since the establishment of the common currency: Eurozone unemployment rose to 10.7 percent from an upwardly revised 10.6 percent the previous month, according [...]

Mitt Romney, struggling to regain the lead from Rick Santorum in national polls and facing a serious deficit in the key primary state of Michigan, has doubled down on his position against the auto industry rescue, arguing that the industry should have gone through a “managed bankruptcy,” mainly to squeeze out the United Auto Workers: [...]

Another solid jobs report ticked down the topline unemployment rate two notches to 8.3%. The economy added 243,000 jobs in January, with slight revisions upwards for November and December, and an annual benchmarking process also generally revised employment upward slightly. The topline unemployment rate has now gone from 9.1% in August to 8.3% in January, [...]

Yesterday, 25 of the 27 Eurozone countries signed a fiscal consolidation pact that almost immediately drew scorn from observers as inadequate and largely irrelevant to the problems of the continent. The meeting of 27 European Union heads of state and government here in Brussels was aimed at completing the text of a so-called fiscal compact [...]

First-time unemployment claims dropped sharply last week to 352,000, a drop of 50,000 from the previous week (the biggest one-week drop since September 2005). It’s important to point out that the moving four-week average, which is a lot less noisy, only dropped 3,000, to around a 379,000 weekly average. But that’s a lot better than [...]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the economy added 200,000 jobs in December, enough to tick the topline unemployment rate down another notch to 8.5%. This was above expectations, but given the decent economic news over the last month, I expected a good report. October’s numbers revised up to +112,000, and November’s to +100,000. [...]

The Spanish economy fell into recession in the last half of 2011, and unemployment went up in December for the fifth straight month, no mean feat in a country which already has 20% unemployment, including almost one-half of all young people. Meanwhile, unemployment in Germany dipped down to 6.8%, a record low. The adjusted jobless [...]

The biggest reason I can find for economic optimism in 2012 is a belief that people will eventually have to buy new cars and form households, so why not this year? That appears to be the animating thought behind Matt Yglesias’ cheery forecast in the new year. Total bank credit, which collapsed during the crisis, [...]

Before moving on with a look at the economy in 2012, I wanted to go back to my forecasts of the economy in 2011. It turns out that the usual suspect economic analysts predicted a “self-sustaining expansion” for 2011. The leading forecasters predicted annualized growth between 3% and 4.5% for the year. I was skeptical. [...]

Over the weekend, the President granted an interview to 60 Minutes. And in it, he raised some eyebrows by claiming that the US could see an 8% unemployment rate by the time of his re-election. To be clear, Obama was responding to a question from Steve Kroft, and merely offered it as a possibility. Kroft: [...]

I mentioned this in passing in an earlier post, but the Republican package on expiring policies wouldn’t necessarily extend the current emergency unemployment benefits, as has been customary in times of high unemployment in the US. Instead, the weeks of eligibility for unemployment insurance would be cut almost in half, from 99 weeks to 59 [...]