Obama: Unemployment Will Rise

From Matthew Benjamin at Bloomberg:
President Barack Obama said the U.S. unemployment rate will reach 10 percent this year, even as the economy begins to emerge from the recession.
“You’re starting to see the engines of the economy turn,” Obama said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television at the White House. “It’s going to take a long time -- we had a huge de-leveraging that took place.”
Obama acknowledged that unemployment lines may keep growing despite government efforts to boost economic growth, saying he’s confident an expansion will begin “shortly.” His outlook mirrors the forecasts of private economists who predict a jobless rate of 10 percent -- a level unseen since 1983 -- by the final three months of the year.
“What you’ve seen is that the pace of job loss has slowed,” the president said. “The economy is going to turn around, but as you know, jobs are a lagging indicator and we’ve got to produce 150,000 jobs every month just to keep pace, just to flatten this out.”
The U.S. economy lost 345,000 jobs in May, the smallest drop since September and less than half the decline in January, reinforcing signs that the deepest recession in half a century is starting to abate. The unemployment rate rose to 9.4 percent, the highest since 1983.