Friday, March 06, 2009 Jobs Contract 14th Straight Month; Unemployment Rate Soars to 8.1%

(Link :http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf)
This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the February Employment Report showing that the empolyment situation is getting worse. Payroll employment has declined by almost 2.6 million in the past 4 months.
2008-10-01 136352 (million)
2008-11-01 135755
2008-12-01 135074
2009-01-01 134419
2009-02-01 133768


By looking at this two graphes we can see comparing to last two years the Nonfarm payroll employment has droped almost 20% and The number of unemployed persons increased by 851,000 to 12.5 million in February which is almost 8.1 percent.
"The unemployment rate continued to trend upward in February for adult men (8.1 percent), adult
women (6.7 percent), whites (7.3 percent), blacks (13.4 percent), and Hispanics (10.9 percent).The
jobless rate for teenagers was little changed at 21.6 percent. The unemployment rate for Asians was 6.9
percent in February, not seasonally adjusted."


connection
The connection this article can link to chapter 15 is the use of trend analysis. Trend analysis is a very useful technique for examining financial statement and analysis presents financial data for a number of consecutive. Although trend analysis is often used to predict future events, it can be used to estimate uncertain events in the past too. but people usually used primarily to see the company or economic flow is performing over the past few months or years. For example, In this article it uses trend analysis to present the current employment situation which is deeply affected by the economic crisis.

Conlusion
Basically Chapter 15 is all about analyzing financial statement. Trend analysis is a comparison between the past time period and the present time period. By collecting information and attempting to spot a pattern, or trend, trend analysis gives us a visual prediction of the future and a visual estimate of the past. As you can see the first picture above, the the unemployment rate rose from 7.6 to 8.1 percent. this is a very significant change. The dramatic change in Nonfarm payroll employment and Unemployment rate represents the current global economic condition. and by looking at the graph, we can predict the Unemployment rate will continue to raise in the next two quarters or three. It may probably pass 10% of the whole population.