How’s that Recovery Going?

September 28, 2020

Donald Trump boasts endlessly about the economic recovery and insists that people are doing great now. The numbers disagree.

We will get the last employment report before the election on Friday. The unemployment rate reported for August was 8.4 percent. We’ll see what happens on Friday, but we are not doing especially well compared to other countries. Here’s the picture.

Source: OECD.

As can be seen, the 8.4 percent August unemployment rate reported for August was well above the 2.9 percent rate reported for Japan, 3.4 percent rate for the United Kingdom, and 4.4 percent rate for Germany. (These are July rates, except for the UK, for which the OECD only has the May rate.) Denmark comes in at 6.0 percent and France at 6.9 percent. The U.S does come in better than Italy, which had a 9.7 percent unemployment rate, and Canada with a 10.2 percent unemployment rate.

In short, the economy has come back a long way from the middle of the shutdown in April, but it still has far to go. And workers in many other countries have done much better.

As Trump might say, numbers have been very bad to him.

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