The official national unemployment rate in the US currently stands at 10.2 percent, but it is believed that this could rise to as much as 13 percent, a post-World War II high.
In fact, many economists believe that already unemployment is currently at least 17 percent, especially when one considers those unemployed who have stopped looking for work but looked for work sometime in the recent past and those workers that are underemployed, that is, working part-time but who would like to work full time.
David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates Inc. and one of the first to forecast the recession, said today in an interview on Bloomberg Radio: “This is going to be the mother of all jobless recoveries.”
Rosenberg said the recession, the deepest since the Great Depression, “is truly secular in nature” and said the economy is “in a post-bubble credit collapse.”
If the official national employment rate reaches 13 percent, it would be the highest since monthly records were kept since January 1948, according to data produced by the Labor Department.
