Tag Archives: Unemployment Rate

Picking the most prosperous city in America is a weighty task. What factors should be considered, and how should each be weighted against the others? However you arrange the calculations, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t have settled on Odessa, ...

Unemployment dropped by 4,000 claims last week, though claims were still up slightly compared to a month prior, according to U.S. Department of Labor.

The U.S. unemployment rate dropped down to 5.5 percent in February, its lowest figure since May 2008, as 295,000 jobs were added, according to the February 2015 Employment Situation released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday.

While the Obama Administration is touting monthly job gains consistently averaging more than 200,000 and a labor market that they say is at its healthiest level since the turn of the century, at least one analyst says that the recently reported national unemployment rate of 5.6 percent may not be telling the complete story.

The unemployment rate, which is measured from a separate household survey, ticked up slightly to 5.7 percent from December's 5.6 percent, reflecting an increase in the number of Americans looking for work. After accounting for annual adjustments to population controls, BLS said the civilian labor force rose by 703,000 in January, bringing the labor force participation rate back up to a still-low 62.9 percent.

Continued labor market improvements may bode well for the housing market for the coming year, since housing relies on steady nationwide employment to flourish, according to some economists' predictions. The national unemployment rate continues to drop – December's rate of 5.4 percent is a decline of 1.1 percentage points from the same month a year earlier.

The latest improvements in regional and state employment statistics across the United States are keeping in line with the latest drop in the nation's unemployment rate (down to 5.6 percent in December) – and in line with analysts' assessments of consistently improving economic and labor conditions.

Forty-one states and the District of Columbia experienced month-over-month declines in their unemployment rate, while 43 states and the District of Columbia saw year-over-year decreases in unemployment for November, according to the Regional and State Employment and Unemployment November 2014 report released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

With Christmas just one week away, RealtyTrac has released a list of the nicest and naughtiest U.S. housing markets based on a number of factors, including foreclosure rate, crime ratings, unemployment rate, school scores, housing affordability, and sex offenders per capita. RealtyTrac found the "nicest" housing market in the U.S. to be Cary, North Carolina, and the "naughtiest" to be Milwaukee, Wisconsin, based on those metrics. Cary was chosen as the nicest housing market based on the city's low unemployment by county rate (4.40 percent), sex offender per capita rate (0.021 percent, or an average of 2.12 sex offenders for every 10,000 people), low foreclosure inventory (0.17 percent, or 17 foreclosures for every 1,000 housing units), total crime index (20.1 percent, for a crime rating of A), average elementary school score for 2013 (1.0979) and home affordability, or the percentage of median income to buy median-priced homes (21.38 percent).

Though regional and state unemployment rates changed little from September to October, 42 states and the District of Columbia saw year-over-year declines in their respective unemployment rates, according to the October 2014 Regional and State Employment and Unemployment report released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).