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.
The seeming improvement U3 and U6 figures in the latest BLS report are undone by the following note in the same report:
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"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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