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The Job Market is Worse Than You Think

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The unemployment rate rose to 7.2% in December, the highest it has been since 1993. That’s obviously not good news.

But the job market might be in even worse shape than this number suggests. There’s a growing number of market experts who think that the government’s employment statistics don’t accurately paint the true picture of the job market.

Now to be fair, the government also does report a so-called underemployment rate, which includes some part-time workers as well as people who have given up looking for work during the past year. That figure is now 13.5%.

But one prominent critic, John Williams, an economist and publisher of the research site Shadowstats.com, said that when you take into account the large number of people who have been so discouraged by job market woes that they have not been actively looking for work for more than a year, the unemployment rate is actually as high as 17.5%