“First Fridays” these days find Wall Street investors and Washington policymakers and pundits holding their collective breath. At around 8:30 AM, on the first Friday of each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the latest round of job and unemployment figures. And then the buying, selling, and spinning begins.
But this insider obsession begs the question: Do these numbers reflect what’s happening on the ground?
To get a better appreciation of how workers and firms across the country are experiencing the downturn--and whether they are on the cusp of recovery, still staring into the abyss, or somewhere in between--we conduct a quarterly assessment of economic conditions in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas, which together account for about two-thirds of U.S. jobs. Today marked the release of the second MetroMonitor, which examined trends through the second quarter (April through June) of 2009. In looking at the 100-metro map of overall performance over the course of the recession (see below), a few patterns stand out:
