As unemployment surges Barack Obama will have to take some awkward economic decisions

As unemployment surges Barack Obama will have to take some awkward economic decisions

IT HAS been a sobering end to the week for Barack Obama. In his
first two days after winning election he was greeted by a 10% plunge in
the stockmarket. Then on Friday November 7th he got the news that
unemployment had shot up to a 14-year high of 6.5% in October and
non-farm employment had plunged by 240,000 from September.

The headlines are bad enough, but the details of the report paint an
even more alarming picture: they suggest that the pace of erosion in
the labour market is accelerating, and that it had begun to do so
before the failure of Lehman Brothers in mid-September sharply worsened
the global financial crisis.