U.S. Unemployment Rate Climbs to 14-Year High of 6.5% (Update2)

U.S. Unemployment Rate Climbs to 14-Year High of 6.5% (Update2)

By Bob Willis and Rich Miller

HIGHLIGHTS

Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) --

The U.S. unemployment rate rose to the highest level since 1994.

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• Jobless Rate Rose: to 6.5 percent in October from 6.1 percent the previous month, the Labor Department reported today in Washington.
  
• Employers Fired: 240,000 workers after a loss of 284,000 in September, the biggest two-month slide since 2001.
• 25-Year High: The total number of unemployed Americans jumped to 10.08 million last month, the highest level in a quarter-century, today’s report showed.
  
• Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight: “We’re heading for a deep recession -- banish the word mild from your vocabulary -- it’s big, it’s bad and it’s broad-based,” said in Lexington, Massachusetts.
  
• Goldman’s Forecast: Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts downgraded their projections for the economy after today’s report, foreseeing the biggest contraction since 1982 in the fourth quarter. Goldman also projects that the unemployment rate will soar to 8.5 percent by the end of next year.
  
• Faltering Economy: and imploding financial markets helped push Obama ahead of Republican rival John McCain, a senator from Arizona, particularly in hard-fought states like Ohio and Florida where unemployment rates have jumped.

COMMENTS

Presidency: "It's the economy, stupid." prove again to be the winning theme for the the Democratic party. Time will tell how effective the new team will be. But there are no magic bullets to this Global Financial Bubble that has been building over the past 20 plus years. It will take a number of years to repair and rebuild the economy.

Bottom Up: Getting money and jobs into the hands of the middle and working class will be the challenge. Solutions that foster growth and opportunity at the grassroots level will help turn this economy around.

Paradigm Shift: Free market behavior will now be shifting to control and regulate. Let us hope that wise policies will be constructed and the pendulum will not swing to far over to the extreme of the other side.


Near Term: More of the same; higher unemployment along with lower stock market & International Commodity Prices. Why? because buying power and access to credit at the consumer level is continuing to drain out of the US and Global populations resulting in increasing bankruptcies. Cash will continue to be King. As has been said before in this blog, we are in a deflationary downturn. Meaning remedies to problems faced in the past will require a different strategy in order to archive success by both Government and Business.

James Monachino