Then it's about time for another cute photo opportunity of his family then. Anything to divert the attention of the unwashed from what's really going on. Push them into talking and debating the important matters at hand like the colour of Mrs O's dress or how the little puppy has grown etc.
Your 11.5% projection could be right on. The government in the past has always included in their employment figures the temps that are hired for the Christmas rush by retailers. I suspect that is what we are seeing from the timing of the report.
1) the self-employed can participate in unemployment if they pay into it, and demonstrate they are REALLY not getting business. Particularly if they have a corp structure and are an employee of the company. 2) source of your claim?
I think .gov hit the panic button when they found out the Black Friday sales numbers, and cooked the books big time on the recent jobs report. Check this out.... http://www.businessinsider.com/trimtabs-the-real-job-loss-number-was-255000-2009-12
Traderzones- I could care less whether the self-employed bought into the plan and can get their unemployment. The point was that potentially self-employed people with significantly reduced incomes were being listed as fully employed....
I asked the same question here: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=184061 If you change the way the number is computed, I don't see how people can compare to another period like the great depression without normalization. From what I understand, using the old way of computing it, it is closer to the 18% value, or nearly at great depression levels.
http://usdebtclock.org/ According to that site, there are 26.4 million actual people unemployed out of a workforce of 138.1 million. That would make the unemployment rate 19.1%