What if You Had a Recession But the Unemployment Rate Didn’t Rise?

17 Jan What if You Had a Recession But the Unemployment Rate Didn’t Rise?

Okay, we have to talk about a recession. It might not happen, but enough indicators are suggesting that it is a possibility that we do have to go there. At the moment, we have these incredibly low unemployment rates in Canada and the U.S. but how quickly could those disappear if the business cycle takes a dive? Well, maybe they will not go up that much at all, which is actually not as good as it sounds. As I write in this column for the Globe and Mail, if people transition away from full time work towards multiple part-time jobs, or to involuntary self-employment or to contract work they aren’t crazy about, the unemployment rate may never go up at all. The next recession, whenever it comes, could indeed look very different from the ones we have seen before, and we should be wary about reading the official statistics on it.