Another great chart from the people at nytimes.com: this one shows how unemployment has risen among various different segments of the population, since January 2007. Here’s what’s happened to the 12-month average employment rate for black men without a high-school degree under 25 years old:

Meanwhile, here’s the chart for white women ages 25 to 44 with a college degree:

The Atlanta Fed charts how the number of people who work part-time but would like to work full time has doubled since the beginning of the recession. That’s not normal, even by the standards of previous harsh recessions:

Anybody care to hazard a guess why this time is so different? The underemployment rate is a whopping 17%, so it’s not just that the rate has doubled from a low base.

(Via Rampell)

Whitney Tilson passes on this chart, showing delinquencies at the FHA. He notes that the FHA is a crucial source of support for the housing market right now, providing a whopping 23% of all mortgages. If you have a subprime credit rating of 600, you only need to put 3.5% down to get an FHA loan; even if you have a positively wrecked credit rating of 500, you can still get a mortgage with only a 10% downpayment. And the people brokering a lot of these loans are often the selfsame shady characters who represented the worst face of the subprime bubble.

How high will the 2008-vintage delinquency rates eventually go? That’s the crucial question, since those mortgages represent more than 20% of the entire FHA portfolio. They’re already high, at 19.4%, but they could go much higher, given that the 2007-vintage loans are over 30%.

We’ve seen this movie before; we know how it ends. There’s going to be an FHA bailout, and it’s going to be big. The only question at this point is just how big it’s going to be.

This beautiful map comes from Stephen Von Worley, who has mapped the contiguous USA by how far any given point is from the nearest McDonald’s. Turns out the McFarthest Spot, somewhere in South Dakota, is 107 miles, as the crow flies, from a Golden Arch. There’s something for South Dakota to be proud of!

(Via Matthies)

Paul Kedrosky finds this chart in a Bloomberg story: it’s the kind of thing which really reinforces one’s belief in the wonders of data-fitting.

The story isn’t actually particularly clear on exactly what the graph is showing, and specifically what “adjusted for currencies” means:

The Nikkei doubled between October 1998 and April 2000 in dollar terms, as the chart illustrates. The S&P 500 has risen 34 percent since March when the Dollar Index, a measure of the dollar against currencies in six major U.S. trading partners, is factored in.

So it seems that the BofA analysts who came up with this chart first converted the Nikkei to dollars, only to then convert the S&P 500, which was in dollars all along, out of dollars. Hm. And they chose pretty random start points: what makes 1980 in Japan analagous to 1990 in the US?

But the most breathtaking claim of all is right there in the Bloomberg headline: “S&P 500 May Surge 40% in Duplication of Japan”.

In other words, the people who came up with this chart are not saying that the US is going basically nowhere over the long term. Instead, they’re saying that there could be a big further rally in the S&P 500 over the short term. On the basis of the fact that the Nikkei rose sharply, in dollar terms, at the tail end of the last decade.

I feel quite safe in saying that of all the years to compare 2009-2010 to, 1999-2000 are probably not the most useful. And looking at what Japanese stocks did ten years ago will tell us absolutely nothing whatsoever about what US stocks are going to do now. No matter how many clever charts you come up with, or ridiculous justifications for the conclusions of your silly exercise in data-fitting:

“Even in economies overcoming credit booms, rallies can be powerful and last much longer than you think,” Bank of America’s Sadiq Currimbhoy, Arik Reiss and Jacky Tang wrote.

Well yes, if you’re caught up in the exuberant tail-end of a global stock-market bubble, maybe. But that spike in the yellow line that BofA thinks we might repeat on our orange line? Was basically a function of excesses like Softbank having a market capitalization of $200 billion. If you want to bet on that kind of thing happening in the US over the next year or two, feel free. But I’ll happily bet against you.

Update: Henry Blodget has the original Merrill report; it seems to admit how tortured the numbers it’s using are, and doesn’t go so far as to actually predict a 40% rally from these levels.

Presented without comment, from Jake:

Well that’s annoying. I just wrote a very long blog entry about Brad Setser’s wonderful multimedia extravaganza over at CFR.org — click here and then click on “Chapter III: Motion Charts”. And then when I tried to post it, it disappeared entirely. So here’s the short version: all four of the wonderful Gapminder-style charts (household balance sheets, financial failures, global imbalances, and economic power shifts) are great, but my favorite is the financial failures one, which shows banks’ capital, assets, and market capitalization over time.

Check out where that financial-failures chart ends: with five European banks all having assets of more than $2.5 trillion, and none of them looking particularly well capitalized. No US bank is that dangerous, partly because no US bank is that big — and US banks are dangerous enough. All five of those European banks are too big to rescue, and none of them is particularly well regulated. How do we fix this problem? I have no idea. But I do know that it’s a huge problem, and that no one is even beginning to address it.

Update: Thanks to Alea for reminding me that European IFRS accounting standards result in significantly larger numbers for total assets than US GAAP standards. But still, the fact is those European banks are big.

Do you like pretty charts comparing this recession to the Great Depression and to other recessions in US history? How about 21 such charts in the same place? Here’s one, from the CFR’s new chartbook. Enjoy!

I always knew that Nouriel Roubini was quite volatile. I just never thought to chart it.

Paul Kedrosky points to this wonderful map of New York City with sparklines showing ridership over time at various subway stations. I can’t get the background map to show up, but the data is all still there, and here’s a bit of the Lower East Side:

It’s well known that the Lower East Side has been resurgent of late — and so the increased traffic at the 2nd Avenue F stop comes as little surprise. (To give you an example of the timescale here, the grey box covers the years from 1952 to 1977.)

What fascinates me about this map is how four stations all of which are quite close to each other can have such very different ridership experiences — a true demonstration of how New York really is made up of very small microneighborhoods.

The Bowery J/M/Z stop has seen less ridership than any other subway station in Manhattan for years, and there are always rumors floating around that it might just be closed. Meanwhile, the Grand Street station just a few blocks away has loads of traffic. Partly that’s a function of the lines they’re on — the B/D lines are useful, while the J/M/Z lines are notoriously unlikely to go anywhere you might ever want to go. But it’s also a function of the fact that the Bowery stop is in a weird not-quite-anything neighborhood, while the Grand Street stop is increasingly finding itself in the heart of a very vibrant Chinatown.

Meanwhile, the Essex and Delancey stop is only very slowly beginning to pick up a little steam — it’s well behind the East Village on that front.

But this chart, of course, is just the beginning. Next up, someone should overlay local property prices, rebased to the NYC average. That could be very interesting indeed.