Unemployment rates are severely under tracked.

[NJ5]

binary solo said:

Unemplyment figures are notoriously fudgable, because there are all sorts of ways you can exclude people from official figures. It's much easier to determine the number of people who are employed (especially in countries that have a PAYE income tax system).

If you want to enjoy the benefits of the current economic system you have to accept the costs: intermittent recession, a minimum 4% unemployment rate to keep wage growth in check, periods of increased unemployment to flatten out wage growth for a while, economic growth largely fueled through debt that eventually tips an ecopnomy into negative growth when some of the worst debt is written off.

I don't think the benefits of the current economic system require that lending be so wild as to result in things like subprime lending.

That seems more like a failure of too much deregulation combined with the greed of the banking sector (and their customers' greed of course).

Rather interestingly the banking sector is giving out more bonuses today than before the crisis, thanks to the largesse of the government bailouts.