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The jobless rate in the Chicago metro are hit a 26-year high during May. The "seasonally unadjusted" rate hit 10.7 percent in May 2009, the highest the area has seen since August 1983. According to Crain's:
There were 185,900 fewer people employed in the metro area last month compared with the same month in 2008. That figure, the highest among the 12 Illinois metro areas reported, suggests that the recession continues to hamper the local labor market.The Chicago metro area was second in the state behind Rockford which saw a rate of 13.4 percent.
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My sister has been out of work for 9 months now. It is really tough out there. What are people to do?
I am a little upset that the government thought that helping out the banks would be the cure to the economy. Lending rates are still down and business is fucked. I think they did the right thing in keeping them stable, but I wish more went to stimulous aid to get white collar workers back to work...I mean construction jobs are really only for skilled workers, correct?
Well, the theory goes that by investing in infrastructure projects, yes the primary beneficiaries are construction firms, but that then creates a landslide into other industries: raw materials, architecture, design, all sorts of other business process industries that feed off of those, and so on. Now, if what Obama has proposed is actually on a large enough scale or was enacted fast enough to enact that momentum, thats another question.
Two things regarding the bail-out of the financial sector:
Back in March, I remember CEOs from the major banks saying that money they would receive from the bail-out wouldn't trickle down to other businesses until Sept-Oct. Also, the first business to receive capital lending would be ones that maintained strong credit, i.e. the business that NEED further loans to weather the recession may not be able to get it. So, in the fourth quarter of the year, things might start to pick up a little, aided by a bump in consumer demand approaching the holidays. However, the construction and real estate market will see their regular seasonal downturn through the winter months, so improvements in some sectors could be matched with weakness in others until spring of 2010. I'm hoping we'll see the economy really start to turn around by this time next year.
Second, I must concur that bailing-out the banks was a positive necessity under the circumstances. The bail-out, in contrast with the stimulus package, wasn't just about(or even mostly) jump starting the economy. It was keeping a catastrophe from turning into an apocalyptic type scenario. Remember Tyler Durden's vision of the future in Fight Club? That scenario where the world's financial market goes bankrupt, so nobody owes anything and nobody owns anything was, at least theoretically, a possibility under laissez-faire policy.
BTW, I am not a banking cheerleader. I'm just a bloke that was earning a master's in the area of strategic human capital when the market crashed, so I am familiar with economic principles and got a lot of different perspectives from bankers that dealt with this first hand.