The increase in unemployment announced by the government is genuinely historic, more than I realized when I first reported the numbers. The rate of unemployment has increased by 4.5 percentage points since December 2007, the first month of the recession.
*There is no other U.S. recession that experienced an increase in unemployment this large since the government has kept accurate records (i.e. since the Great Depression in the 1930s). None. The only comparable period was the double recession of 1980 and 1981-82, when the increase peaked at 4.5 percentage points.
**It turns out that I had not updated revised numbers in the database I use, so the charts I have been producing in recent months have reported current unemployment rate changes that were too low by 0.1 percentage points. To clarify, I would like to report not only the 1-decimal unemployment rate (used in BLS reports), but the 3-decimal rate calculated using the reported number of unemployed persons divided by the size of the civilian labor force from the CPS.
The May 2009 unemployment rate can be calculated out to 3 decimal points as 9.357 percent (which the BLS rounds up to 9.4). In December 2007, the declared first month of the recession, it was 4.902. The change is 4.455 percentage points. However, if we use the unemployment trough instead, which was 4.380 percent in December 2006, then the trough-to-current change is 4.977 percentage points. Now let's compare these numbers to the 1980-82 era, which was until now the worst recession in modern times.
U.S. UNEMPLOYMENT RATES AND CHANGES IN 2 RECESSIONS*
2007- 1980-
9.357 10.750 Peak (so far)
4.902 6.271 Recession Start
4.380 5.606 Trough
4.455 4.479 Change from Start
4.977 5.144 Change from Trough
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