Economic News – The Real and Imagined

I received a Twitter message yesterday with the note that New York and Boston will be leading the rest of the nation, but not in a good way.

I followed the link which took me to this story.

The headline is certainly grim “Forecast: Boston Near Top in Job Losses.” That’s enough to make you want to crawl under a rock and start eating beans and weenies.

Now I’m a remodeling contractor in the Boston area with an acute interest in the economic situation in this area. The overall economic health of the area drives my business. Based on that I wanted to understand the article in a deeper fashion.

When I got to the second sentence, the article tells me “The Boston area’s unemployment rate is forecast to rise to 6 percent by the end of the year. . .”

Now this is a very different story. All you’ve been hearing around the news is that the unemployment rate is 8 percent and headed higher. Now that I’ve read the second line of the story, I get a much better picture. Compared to the overall average, 6 percent unemployment in the Boston area doesn’t sound bad. In fact, it doesn’t sound bad at all.

Now I’m no Pollyanna and don’t pretend that we don’t face significant economic hurdles, but it’s a little wearing to find that all the economic data is being reported with the most negative spin. The real problems are serious enough without spinning things even more negative.