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Wall Street Journal
Decoding 'Natural' Rate of Unemployment
Neil Shah. September 7, 2012.
Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1038358262?accountid=12085

UNEMPLOYMENT Neil Shah wrote this article which briefly covers the topics of unemployment and the natural unemployment rate. The way our economy has been on a downward slope has led to the need to write about the natural unemployment rate. There are more and more people losing their jobs. Not only do they lose their jobs, but the longer that they are out of the job market, the more uninterested future employees are at hiring them, thus putting them out for a long period of time. The article focuses on how the natural rate was 5%, but has increased more recently. It tries to determine what the underlying cause of the increase is. The natural rate is healthy because it leaves room for the ebb and flow of the economy. However, increasing this natural rate only means that there are more people than should be out of work. Neil Shah believes that the reason for the higher rate of unemployment is due to a weak demand for workers. The main issue with the higher unemployment rate is that the higher it gets, the Federal Reserves would like to join in an effort to help the economy, but by doing so it leaves a risk for a higher inflation. Shah believes that instead of raising the natural rate of unemployment that we need to figure out where normal unemployment ends and find where irregular unemployment begins. He says this because due to unemployment insurance, some people are staying unemployed longer than they should and then it starts to mess with the figures of the natural rate. This therefore would be the unintended consequence. Too much unemployment will only bring the economy down further, and then when the Feds try to step in they will raise inflation which in turn will continue to hurt the economy.

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