The most recent underemployment figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, indicating that 43% of 22-27 year old college graduates who are working in jobs that do not require their university degrees, show a nearly 2% increase from February 2020, pre-COVID economic disruption. Yet, as college graduates are usually the last cohort to be more widely affected in…
In the current economic upheaval, those individuals with more education are unemployed at lower rates than all other groups. Or by wages, assuming that wage is an indicator of educational attainment, those with $60,000+ in wages have lower rates of unemployment than those earning less than $60,000. However, if the recession during The Great Financial Crisis of 2009 is an…
The difficulties for those in the younger generations to generate wealth are consequences of a structural shift in the U.S. economy in the last forty years, well before today’s late Boomer and Gen X parents entered the labor market as twenty-somethings. As highlighted in a recent Federal Reserve Bank research paper, “Market Power, Inequality, and Financial Instability”, Isabel Cairo &…
Consumer confidence on Main Street, as measured by the Conference Board, is waning, dipping lower than levels at the height of the shelter-in-place orders in April, in direct opposition to the rapidly improving confidence of Wall Street from the lows in Spring 2020. And, yet, that same Wall Street confidence only constitutes 10% of Americans who own 87% of the…
In the current economic backdrop, where the median view of economists predict a near 5% year over year decline in GDP (total amount of goods and services produced in the American economy) for 2020 (officially a recession), where both initial and continuing unemployment claims stubbornly loom above their longer run average, and though the economy seems to have bottomed, a…
Many are doing more with less, while living through the global, systemic retreat from “life as we knew it”, induced by a virus we cannot see. For some, though, doing the “same with less” is now their life’s maxim, having accepted substantial pay cuts to remain employed during the current economic upheaval. As Megan Casella of Politco writes: Now, with…
As the Class of 2020 commences, into what economic state do they commence? As reported by Courtney Weaver in the Financial Times on May 28, 2020: With US unemployment at its highest level since the second world war and the country still grappling with the economic fallout of coronavirus, university graduates are watching start dates be deferred, internships cancelled and…
Awoken at 6:46 am on the Saturday after the 4th of July, through groggy consciousness, I registered the staccato sounds of a teenage texter. I recalled that The College Board released the 2019 AP (Advanced Placement) Exam scores (at least in California) on that fine morning. His texts were the first of many I received throughout the rest of the…
The above chart depicts that the wealthiest and upper middle class have not only regained their wealth previous to the 2008 recession, but gained greater wealth, at the expense of the middle class and poorest classes. And, now, middle class and poorer families are facing an even greater economic downturn that has yet to be even defined in scope, though…
Graph courtesy of The Wall Street Journal Current college students, many who find themselves at home though would rather be finishing their school year on college campuses around the country, will be confronting along with their older colleagues who graduated college in 2019, 2018, a possibly more complicated problem that of protracted unemployment. In addition, the long term economic outlook…
