RJ and Makay

With the overall unemployment rate now officially down to 8.9%, financial professionals may be wondering how the employment situation in their industry compares. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, things are better than average in the financial industry and continuing to gradually improve.

Indeed, BLS data for the "financial activities supersector," which consists of the Finance and Insurance sector and the Real Estate, Rental, and Leasing sector, show that joblessness in the supersector fell from 7.2% in January to 6.9% in February. As a whole, the supersector now has 7,608,000 employees, up from 7,605,000 in January.

Although the latest government figures show overall unemployment has fallen from 9.4% to 9%, it appears joblessness in the financial sector is on the rise.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there are fewer people working in the financial sector than at anytime in the last 10 years. The preliminary numbers show 7,606,000 workers in the industry for January. This represents a loss of 60,000 jobs since last January and a loss of 742,000 jobs since the peak in February 2007, when the financial sector boasted 8,348,000 employees.