Portal:Financial Crisis/Explanation of the Numbers



The Financial Crisis Tracker gives a monthly snapshot of housing foreclosures, unemployment rates and the total cost of the Wall Street bailout. The Tracker is presented in the form of a widget that can be downloaded to your webpage.

The Foreclosure number is generated monthly by RealtyTrac, a private data source used by newspapers across America. The RealtyTrac data is released in the second week of the month for the previous month.

The Unemployment number is generated by the U.S. Department of Labor and released on the first Friday of the month for the previous month. The larger DOL data set is rich with information about unemployment and underemployment in the U.S. economy.

The Wall Street Bailout number is our original calculation of the total bailout expenditures to date. Our calculation was peer-reviewed by economists at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington D.C. Our table tallying all government bailout programs can be accessed here.