While Big Pharma's Great Recession rolls on (with GSK layoffs, BMS salary freezes, AstraZeneca layoffs and Pfizer cutting its internal R&D budget), the bigger picture is coming a little clearer and is just a little better than last month's. These days, that's all we can hope for.
Today's BLS report indicates that the official unemployment rate (U3) for January 2010 was 9.7%, which is the lowest it's been since September 2009. It's also lower than December's rate of 10.0%. In addition, the broadest measure of unemployment (U6) is at 16.5% for January, which is lower than December's rate of 17.3% and lower still than October 2009's high of 17.5%.
One step in front of the other -- hopefully, Big Pharma will follow. Hopefully.
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The seeming improvement U3 and U6 figures in the latest BLS report are undone by the following note in the same report:
ReplyDelete"The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) continued to trend up in January, reaching 6.3 million. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of long-term unemployed has risen by 5.0 million." --The Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest Employment Situation Summary, released on Friday, February 5, 2010
"Trend up" equals "more jobless."
The U3 report you're quoting is missing one MAJOR number, 1+ MILLION Americans ran out of unemployment compensation on Feb. 28th 2010 and thus they no longer appear in the official U3 calculations. We are in a depression, it's getting worse and everybody knows it!
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