It’s official. It’s also arbitrary and a psychological barrier, but that makes it no less real: The unemployment rate is in the double digits nationwide, although the Kansas City area has remained slightly below that nationwide trend for most of the year.
The psychology is straightforward. You can line up as many other economic indicators as you want and argue that the recession is winding down. You can point to progress – and it is progress – in the fact that jobs are disappearing far more slowly than they were six, eight, 10 months ago.
But as long as people feel insecure and as long as they know the job market is still headed south, consumers are likely to be skittish. It doesn’t help that we haven’t seen 10 percent or higher joblessness in more than 25 years. That means that for many workers, this isn’t the worst they’ve heard of but it’s the worst they’ve experienced. We’re still getting used to the “new normal.”
There is some daylight. The business conditions index for the Midwest – done each month at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb. – still puts Missouri’s overall economy in positive territory for October. Still, Ernie Goss, the Creighton University professor who heads that program, said Missouri’s unemployment will likely edge up about two-tenths of a percentage point by the end of the year. Manufacturing is not great but headed in the right direction, the Creighton group finds.
The white-knuckle ride of last fall has given way to the slow slog upward we’ve seen for much of this year. There’s a ways yet to go.
