As Madison rang in 2009, still giddy from the election of President Barack Obama, there was optimism the city could somehow avoid the economic fallout from the great recession.
After all, the government town had survived previous downturns virtually unscathed thanks to the twin pillars of the University of Wisconsin and state of Wisconsin.
….The Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a liberal-leaning UW-Madison think tank, kept a running tally of the stateâ??s job scene with monthly updates. Its final report for 2009 showed the state had lost 163,000 jobs since the recession officially began in December 2007 â?? or 5.7 percent of the total jobs in the state.
â??The current downturn has now far surpassed the recession of the early 1980s with respect to percent of jobs lost,â? the report says.
The stateâ??s unemployment rate, however, peaked at 9 percent, failing to reach double digits as some had predicted. The jobless rate has since fallen back to 8.2 percent.