(By William Patalon III) The stock market has soared 58% since its March 2008 low – and the media is proclaiming that the recovery has begun.
Not so fast.
There are three major factors threatening to stall the recovery before it even gets started. And the "jobless recovery" you've been hearing about is just one of them.
That's why now it's more important than ever to protect your money.
This report unveils the 3 factors holding back the U.S. recovery. And, it shows you not only how to protect your money, but how to profit until the economy rebounds for good.
Are American Workers Facing a Jobless Recovery?
Since the recession started in December 2007, the economy has shed a staggering 6.9 million jobs, the highest number of job losses since the Great Depression.
High unemployment has put a serious damper on the economy. It's simple – if people don't have jobs, they can't spend money.
The reduction in consumer spending ripples through every sector of the economy – touching such key business areas as housing and manufacturing, and influencing the prices of such everyday items as gasoline and food.
The most commonly quoted number in the media is the "official" unemployment rate, which now stands at 9.7%.
But to get the real picture, you have to add in what the government refers to as "discouraged" workers and "marginally attached" workers – those who have stopped looking for work, or who haven't looked for work recently. Add those in and the U.S. unemployment rate starts to approach 17%.
And it gets even worse. If you include the people that the government doesn't even count – such as unemployed farm workers, the idle self-employed, and workers in private homes – the unemployment rate reaches a jaw-dropping 20.6%, according to figures compiled by John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics. If that's true, an astonishing 25.5 million people are currently out of work in the U.S.
Analysts have been cheered by the recent decline in initial applications for jobless benefits (down by 12,000 to 545,000 in the week ended September 12). Overall, payrolls lost "only" 216,000 jobs in August, which was lower than economists' forecast and the smallest number of job losses in the past year.
U.S.
