The headline looks calm, the composition does not. US unemployment is 4.3% (eased from 4.5% in November), but long-term joblessness (27+ weeks) has nearly doubled since 2023 to 2.0 million people, up three straight years with no give-back.
The long-term share of the unemployed is back to 27.5% (it was 17.8% just after Covid; the GFC extreme was 45.5%) - so more than one in four of the unemployed are now past the line that scars. Measured against the whole workforce, long-term joblessness is at 1.18% and still rising; in the past 25 years it has only stepped up like this once (the dot-com era). When long-term pulls away from the headline like this, that is the slow-grind 2008 shape - this time with no recession to blame, which raises the question of whether AI is lifting the jobless floor.
Track the BLS/FRED series live: https://www.tigzig.com/tremor. Full analysis: https://www.tigzig.com/post/us-unemployment-long-term-hidden-jun2026. Related: is the S&P masking the cracks - https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/is-sp500-at-all-time-highs-masking-credit-stress.
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