Tag Archives: Unemployment Rate

The unemployment rate rose to 14.7%, and the housing industry was not immune to the impact.

The good news is that in April, the unemployment rate fell below 4 percent, a first since 2000, according to the latest Employment Situation Summary report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. So what’s the bad news?

Job gains totaled 223,000 in June as the unemployment rate dipped to 5.3 percent, according to the June 2015 Employment Situation released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Thursday. With June's payroll increase, the average monthly job gain for the last 12 months in the United States is 250,000. Job gains in April and May were revised downward to 187,000 and 254,000, respectively, which was a combined 60,000 lower than previously reported.

While the nation's unemployment rate (5.5 percent) and the number of unemployed persons (8.7 million) for May 2015 remained virtually unchanged from the previous month, the number of jobs added in May increased substantially from April up to 280,000, according to the May 2015 Employment Summary released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday.

Other metrics that changed little month-over-month in February, according to BLS, include the civilian labor force participation rate (62.8 percent, and it has remained between 62.7 and 62.9 since April 2014), the number of long-term unemployment persons, or those unemployed for more than 27 weeks (2.7 million), involuntary part-time workers, or workers employed part-time for economic reasons (6.6 million), persons marginally attached to the labor force (2.2 million), and discouraged workers, or those who are not currently looking for work because they believe there are no jobs available (732,000).

Wells Fargo's April data suggests consumer sentiment slipped in Florida one point to 79 for the month, largely due to increased concerns about current economic conditions. The concern, both locally and nationally, outweighed a slight increase in confidence about future conditions for the economy as a whole. The Florida index largely reflected the nation's attitude, with the overall index dropping slightly to 82.3.

Employers across the country added 288,000 jobs to their payrolls in April, bringing the unemployment rate down to a new post-crash low. According to the latest report from the Labor Department, the rate of unemployment last month fell to 6.3 percent, down nearly half a percentage point after a flat March. At an estimated 9.8 million, the number of unemployed people was down by 733,000.