WASHINGTON - The US unemployment rate may rise to a post-World War II high of 13 percent in the aftermath of the recession, said David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates Inc. in Toronto.
“This is going to be the mother of all jobless recoveries,’’ Rosenberg, one of the first to forecast the recession, said yesterday.
Rosenberg said the economy is “in a post-bubble credit collapse.’’
A 13 percent unemployment rate would be the highest since monthly records began in January 1948. Yearly records, which began in 1929, show joblessness climbed to almost 25 percent in 1933.
The Labor Department reported Nov. 6 that unemployment increased to 10.2 percent in October, the highest since 1983.
The US economy could rival Japan’s so-called lost decade of the 1990s, Rosenberg said. “This has some prints of Japan in many respects,’’ where growth stagnated for years and prices fell.
Rosenberg was Merrill Lynch’s top North American economist from 2002 to earlier this year.
