Unless you fix the unemployment The Housing Market will never get fixed. You can make the mortgages cheap as you want but unless you are working you cannot buy a house.
Unemployment across the nation
For decades, the nation’s economic landscape consisted of a
prospering Sun Belt and a struggling Rust Belt. Since the
recession hit, though, that is no longer the case.
Unemployment remains high across much of the country — the national rate is 9.1% — but the regions have recovered at different speeds. The once-booming South, which entered the recession with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, is now struggling with some of the highest rates, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
Several Southern states — including South
Carolina, whose 11.1% unemployment rate is the fourth highest in the nation — have higher unemployment rates than they did a year ago. Let me see? South Carolina is where the NLRB is in court trying to prohibit Boeing from Opening a new plant?
Unemployment in the South is now higher than it is in the Northeast and the Midwest, which include Rust Belt states
that were struggling even before the recession. The West has the highest unemployment in the nation. The collapse of the housing bubble left Nevada with the highest jobless rate, 13.4%, followed by California with 12.1%. Michigan has the third-highest rate, 11.2%, as a result of the longstanding woes of the American auto industry. Now, though, of the states with the 10 highest unemployment rates, six are in the South. The region, which relied heavily on manufacturing and construction, was hit hard by
the downturn.
Economists offer a variety of explanations for the
South’s performance. “For a long time we tended to outpace
the national average with regard to economic performance, and a lot of that was driven by, for lack of a better word, development and in-migration,” said Michael Chriszt, an assistant vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s research department. “That came to an abrupt halt, and it has not picked up.”
The reordering of the nation’s economic fortunes can be seen in the Brookings analysis, which found that many auto-producing metropolitan areas in the Great Lakes states are seeing modest gains in manufacturing that are helping them recover from their deep slump, while Sun Belt and Western states with sharp drops in home values are still suffering. The areas that have been hurt the least since the recession, the study said, rely on government, education or energy production. Places that were less buoyed by the housing bubble were less harmed when it burst.
In Pennsylvania, the analysis found, the Pittsburgh area — which is heavily reliant on education and health care — is weathering the downturn better than the Philadelphia area. In New York, areas around long-struggling upstate cities like Buffalo and Rochester are recovering faster by some measures than the New York City metropolitan area. And the rate of recovery in Rust Belt areas around Youngstown and Akron, two Ohio cities that were hit hard, has outpaced that of former boomtowns like Colorado Springs and Tucson. In a sign of how severe the downturn has been, the Brookings analysis found that only 16 of the nation’s
100 largest metropolitan areas have regained more than half of the jobs they lost during the recession.
So what happened in South Carolina? Richard Kaglic, a regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Va., said the state’s lingering troubles reflect what happened when its construction and manufacturing industries were hit hard by the recession. Mr. Kaglic, who is also a pilot, used an aviation metaphor to explain what he meant. “If your nose is high, if you’re climbing faster and your engine cuts out, you fall farther and it takes you a longer time to recover,” he said. “The conditions we experienced in late 2008, 2009, are as close as you come to an engine-out situation in the economy.” But Mr. Kaglic said that the recent return of manufacturing jobs was giving him hope, and that one reason for the high unemployment
rate was that more people were now seeking work. “I would look at it as our dreams are delayed,” he said, “rather than our dreams being denied.” But for How Long?
Until we get a President that is business friendly and tries to help business grow rather than punish success we will never turn the economy around.
Michael Mack
An American
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