Unemployment at Standstill

The good news: the unemployment rate seems to have stopped rising.

Unfortunately, it not falling either.

March unemployment numbers show little change since the previous month.  The number of unemployed persons remained around 13.5 million, and the unemployment rate of 8.8 percent also changed little.

No matter how you break down the numbers, be it by gender (adult men – 8.6 percent), adult women -7.7 percent), age (teenagers – 24.5 percent), or race (whites – 7.9 percent, blacks – 15.5 percent, and Hispanics – 11.3 percent) the numbers stood still in March.

There was one small increase listed.  The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was 6.1 million in March; their share of the unemployed increased from 43.9 to 45.5 percent over the month.  That number may inch up in the coming months, unless we start to see far more jobs being created.