Where Are We in the Unemployment Trend? – Historical Perspective

“This time it’s different…”

Very often, the people who utter those words end up feeling quite stupid and having less money in their brokerage/IRA accounts than before. Usually it is because that when you go along with conventional wisdom and group think, you wind up in a very crowded trade with little room left to run. Today however, the conventional wisdom is that this time it’s not different and that we will proceed to have a strong jobless recovery. The jobless recovery phenomena may have worked in past recessions but A.) There are only so many times you can have a “jobless recovery” before it’s not an actual recovery as evidenced by the continued drop in real productivity and income per capita and B.) This is by no means a normal recession.

Take a look at the chart below, I hope it offers some valuable perspective and context (note that the data doesn’t even include numbers from 2008 and 2009) . This time, things may very well be different…

-MJB