By Patrick Wood, Editor

A few eco­nomic ana­lysts, including this writer, have been protesting that the real unem­ploy­ment rate in the United States is much higher than sta­tis­tics released by the Administration.

Now, in a candid speech just deliv­ered by the pres­i­dent of the Fed­eral Reserve Bank of Atlanta, a top Fed offi­cial finally tells it like it is:

“If one con­siders the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called dis­cour­aged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unem­ploy­ment rate would move from the offi­cial 9.4 per­cent to 16 percent.”

This is 70 per­cent higher than offi­cial statistics.

Another aspect reveals that many more men have lost jobs than women. This is because con­struc­tion related jobs, which tra­di­tion­ally are man-oriented, account for about 40 per­cent of the unemployed.

Dennis Lock­hart, pres­i­dent of the Atlanta branch of the Fed, also stated that post-recession economy will not fully resemble the pre-recession economy. Some sec­tors have sus­tained per­ma­nent damage, and may per­ma­nently lose jobs, leaving many employees to face career changes and retraining

Lock­hart concluded,

“If my prog­nosis for the broad economy is cor­rect, the pace of job restora­tion and growth through the medium term will be frus­trat­ingly slow.”

One factor that Lock­hart left out of his speech is that many early baby-boomers (62 – 65 years old) are being forced into early retire­ment, which shrinks the entire avail­able labor pool. Social Secu­rity offices around the country have been inun­dated with requests for early ben­e­fits. This would push the actual unem­ploy­ment rate even higher, per­haps as high as 18 – 20 percent.