Unemployment Extension Update: US Unemployment Figures Affecting Economies Around the World

Recent statistics released by the US Labor Department indicated that during the week ending on the 14th of August, an incredible 500,000 increase was recorded in the number of unemployed workers filing for unemployment benefits. The US economy has all but stalled, and the repercussions of this have been felt globally, as troubles in the US economy, the largest economy in the world, impacts virtually every economy in the world.

As a direct result of the US unemployment crisis and more specifically, the recent announcement by The US Labor Department, stock markets across the world are down, and many major currencies also decreased in value. This has resulted in growing support for the campaign of the 99ers to have Congress pass a bill which creates a new Tier 5 of unemployment extension benefits, as people across the world realize that a global recovery from the recession will be severely hampered if the US economy does not start to show some significant signs of recovery.

Economic experts, both domestic and foreign, point out that the US economy would start to show signs of improvement if Congress were to re-extend the current extensions to the unemployment benefits structure, and implement a new Tier 5 of benefits, with some of them adding that this would help to avert an even more serious unemployment crisis in the US.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner for Economics stated his views on the current unemployment crisis and said: “If you give money to someone who’s well off they’re probably going to save a lot of it because they’re not living hand-to-mouth. If you give money to someone who is on the edge, who has been unemployed for 30 weeks, who is desperate than they are going to spend it right away. The government doesn’t have to spend it - the government just has to provide it to people.”