Weekly Recap (12/20/10-12/25/10)
Saturday
Unemployed homeowners: Don’t let your benefits lapse!
Unemployed, but doing everything you possibly can to keep your home? If so, it’s important to understand that if you’re more than three months delinquent on your mortgage payments, you won’t qualify for the latest initiative to assist unemployed homeowners. That’s why it’s more important than ever to understand the latest extension of unemployment benefits.
President Obama signed a law extending unemployment benefits for another 13 months when he signed a larger tax-cut bill on December 17, 2010. However, those who have already collected 99 months worth of benefits will not be collecting additional money.
Can the Jobs Summit Yield a Cost-Effective Solution?
We just recently read that, according to the critics, the president’s jobs summit — which began earlier this afternoon — “is more about politics than policy.” If you think about it, isn’t most, if not all, policy driven by political pressures?
On one hand, economists like Lawrence Summers feel that “There is no more important priority for the American economy than jobs.” On the other hand, many lawmakers are up for reelection in 2010, and how their home states interpret how their lawmakers handle the unemployment situation could influence whether or not they remain in office, and whether or not the president will continue to have a Democratic Congress on his side. With all that said, the pressure is on from all sides to stem the tide of job loss: Read the rest of this entry »
Jobs: “One of the Great Challenges That Remains”
President Obama announced today that a jobs summit will be held at the White House next month in order to recast legislative attention to a sector of the economy that has worsened:
“This is one of the great challenges that remains in our economy, a challenge that my administration is absolutely determined to meet,” [said the president].
Unemployment Rate Hits 26-Year High
It’s the first Friday of September, so that means August’s unemployment numbers are in — and they aren’t pretty. The unemployment rate in August increased 0.3% to reach 9.7%, the highest level observed in 26 years. Non-farm payrolls declined by 216,000 in August, marking the 20th-straight-monthly decline, bringing the grand total since the downturn began in December of 2007 to 131.2 million.
While the monthly employment declines continue to lessen from previous months, analysts say that any signs of recovery in the job market won’t occur until hiring resumes — the loss of 216,000 jobs doesn’t signify a properly functioning economy. The slowing monthly declines are surely welcomed, but, besides the unemployment rate being most troubling, the duration of time that Americans are staying unemployed has become another added strain on the market’s ability to recover: Read the rest of this entry »
Jobless Claims Rise with Benefits Extension
Initial unemployment claims rose by 7,000 to 455,000 in the week ending August 2, the highest level observed since March 2002. In recent weeks, unemployment claims have been boosted by Congress’ 13-week extension in unemployment benefits:
Some applicants for the new 13-week extension actually found that they were eligible for new jobless benefits. Thus, “people are coming into the system that probably would not have filed absent” the extended-benefits program, a Labor Department analyst said Thursday, though the analyst was unable to say exactly how many.
