Unemployment Confronts Obama Rhetoric With Chronic Joblessness

Share | Email | Print | A A A

By Rich Miller

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Full employment ain’t what it used to be.

Economists since the mid-1990s have reckoned that full employment was equivalent to about a 5 percent unemployment rate, taking into account the time required to switch jobs. Now Nobel Prize winner Edmund Phelps and Pacific Investment Management Co. Chief Executive Officer Mohamed El-Erian say the fallout from the deepest recession in more than five decades is driving the so-called natural rate higher, perhaps to 7 percent.

“We are in the midst of a large and protracted increase in both actual unemployment and its natural rate,â€