February 2010 Unemployment Rate Holds

by Tim Krulia – Private Money Blueprint CFO

As part of our quest here at PMBP to give you the single best resource on the financial aspects of growing your real estate investing business (aka, we help people find private money quickly, easily, and abundantly)… here’s an article I found titled, “Jobs report shows unemployment unchanged,” by David Goldman…

This article is great. It has a chart that shows the number of jobs lost monthly since January 2009 to present. I’m not sure why the author is attributing the better than expected jobs numbers to the big snow storms last month. I would think that something like a blizzard would be a negative on businesses and prompt more lay offs. Whatever though.

The important part to take away from this article is really that unemployment stayed unchanged from last month at 9.7%.

I love it! If you’ve been following my articles you know my theory on how the economy is going to start taking strides forward if the unemployment rate holds and improves a little in the next few months! By the unemployment rate not getting worse, I think it’s still supporting my hypothesis that the unemployment rate has peaked in this recession. Check this out… I gathered this info from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to create a chart I can update each month to better illustrate the historical trends of this recession’s unemployment rate.

I started this chart at the beginning of 2007 because that’s when we as real estate investors started seeing our own recession start to get ramped up. I guess the recession by definition didn’t get going until about the beginning of 2008. As you can see the unemployment rate consistently increased for two years (2008 – 2010).

Now we’re creating a nice peak right at the 10% area. The “9 per. Mov. Avg.” is just a 270 day moving average I tossed in there because it’s pretty cool to see that our unemployment rate just crossed under it. So it’s awesome to see that we broke through that floor.

Anyway, here’s my silly little hypothesis:

Get about 3 to 5 more months of the unemployment rate holding or dropping and the recovery will be 100% full force back on! Why? The media & the Government will start to make a big deal out of it’s kinda good news (only kinda good because the unemployment rate will still be over 9% most likely at that time). We’ll see everyone start to believe that the recessionary times are over, and businesses will start rocking again.

My guess is that the unemployment rate will drop from the then maybe 9.4%ish to about 7.5% by the end of 2011. The basis for the 7.5% rate guess-timation is that in our last recession it took about 24 months to gain about 50% back of the recession’s unemployment rate original run up. History has a tendency to repeat itself.

This recession’s unemployment rate curve’s slope is similar to that of the prior recession when it was increasing rapidly. This recession was just over a longer period of time so the unemployment rate increased at a similar velocity but over a longer period of time (making this a much worse recession for unemployment than back in 2001).

About half of the original run-up in unemployment rate is roughly 2.5%…..so it makes sense to think that we could be looking at a 10% – 2.5% = 7.5% unemployment rate in December 2011 and then of course possibly we’d go all the way down to 5% in December 2013. No – it’s not very scientific, and Yes – it’s a blind guess, but here’s for taking a stab at it anyway.

What are you’re guess-timations?

Do you think that an improving economy over the next 4 years will be good for private money recruiting or bad?

Let’s hear it!!