Unemployment Rate 1990 To Present (CHART)
The unemployment rate was 4.8% in December 2007 when the recession was declared official, and as of the April 2010 jobs report on Friday, it was 9.9%. We did have the best monthly gain in jobs in four years on the April report with +290k jobs (or +224k ex-Census workers), but we’ve lost 7.72m jobs since the recession began. Need a string of April-like numbers to sustain a recovery. You can hover over chart below to see official BLS-reported unemployment rates for each month in this series beginning in 1990. The link above will take you to the most recent data from last Friday.