The unemployment rate in the euro zone hit 9.6% in August - the highest in over a decade after the number of jobless rose by 165,000 during the month, bringing the total jobless number using the single currency bloc to 15.17 million. The 10-year high comes despite the fact that many [ Read More → ]

On Wall Street, it paid to wear rose-colored glasses in the third quarter. Another surge in stock prices rewarded investors who kept faith that the recession was ending — even amid growing concern about the recovery’s dependence on government support. The Dow Jones industrial average, which slipped 29.92 points, or 0.3%, to [ Read More → ]

Hopes of an early exit from the recession today boosted the US after the Commerce Department revealed that the world’s no.1 economy shrank at a far slower rate in the second quarter than previous estimates showed. According to the Commerce Department, the US economy contracted by 0.7% between the April and [ Read More → ]

Commerce Minister Simon Power plans to force out “incompetent and unskilled” liquidators and receivers in a bid to improve regulation of insolvency practitioners. Courts will be able to ban incompetent or delinquent practitioners from operating as liquidators, receivers and voluntary administrators, Power told a business audience in Auckland today. The proposal [ Read More → ]

WASHINGTON - The recession has hit middle-income and poor families hardest, widening the economic gap between the richest and poorest Americans as rippling job layoffs ravaged household budgets. The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans , those making more than $138,000 each year , earned 11.4 times the roughly $12,000 made by [ Read More → ]

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has today revealed that the UK economy contracted by 0.6% in the April to June period - rather than the 0.7% previously reported and the 0.8% reported prior to that. The latest revision comes as the manufacturing and construction sectors performed better than originally [ Read More → ]

The figures come despite official data that suggests consumers want to save money more than at any time in the last six years, as they tighten their belts to cope with the recession. Despite the all-time low savings rates that banks and building societies are offering, the so-called [ Read More → ]

The percentage of households receiving food stamps in Philadelphia increased by nearly 3 percentage points between 2007 and 2008 - the period of time marking the start of the recession - according to figures released yesterday by the U.S. Census Bureau. And that number is only expected to rise, according to [ Read More → ]

WASHINGTON - Big job losses and a spike in early retirement claims from laid-off seniors will force Social Security to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes the next two years, the first time that’s happened since the 1980s. The deficits , $10 billion in 2010 and $9 [ Read More → ]

As the Citizens Advice Bureau service turns 70 today, it has revealed that record numbers of people are turning to the charity for help with recession-linked problems of job loss and debt. The new figures show that Citizens Advice Bureaux across England and Wales are dealing with an average of 9,300 [ Read More → ]