It's a DEPRESSION, folks!
It's not great writing or profound thought, but when I saw these numbers I though "What an asshole!"
"Unemployment at 16-year high; 11m now jobless as firms keep cutting" by Louis Uchitelle, New York Times | January 10, 2009
The nation lost 524,000 jobs in December, reflecting a pervasive fear among employers that if they fail to shed workers quickly their companies might go under in a recession poised to become the worst since the 1930s.
The unemployment rate, meanwhile, jumped to a 16-year-high of 7.2 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday. The growing army of the unemployed, at 11.1 million, is nearly 50 percent bigger than at the start of the recession a year ago....
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The December decline in jobs came on top of similar losses in October and November. Not since 1980 has the workforce shrunk so much in just three months. Companies across all industries are grappling with sales that are deteriorating rapidly just as they lose easy access to loans.
"The simplest way for a company to hoard cash is to drain their inventories and fire their workers," said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the Investment Technology Group, a research and trading firm, "and everywhere you look, that is what is happening."
The total number of jobs lost in the recession now totals 2.59 million, counting upward revisions for October and November, with many more cuts anticipated in coming months. Nearly as troubling, hundreds of thousands more people sought full-time work in December but could not get more than part-time jobs.
If any!
If those workers are included, the so-called total unemployment rate swelled to 13.5 percent from 12.6 percent in November and just 8.7 percent at the start of the recession. Total unemployment includes the officially unemployed, the part-timers who seek more hours, and the nearly 300,000 who would like a job but tell pollsters from the Bureau of Labor Statistics they are too discouraged to look.
Hi.
Employers in nearly every industry cut payrolls. Only healthcare and education bucked the trend in December, adding just 45,000 jobs combined, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Manufacturers, construction companies, and retailers have led all year in eliminating jobs, and they did so again in December.
"What happened to jobs in the fourth quarter tells us unmistakably that this recession is going to be a long one and a deep one," Barbera said. "The toughest six months," he added, "will be the just-completed fourth quarter and the first quarter of this year."
Translation: It's a DEPRESSION!
The consensus view of economists surveyed by Blue Chip Economic Indicators is that the economy will continue to contract until July at the very earliest, but at a slowing pace in the second quarter. That would make it the longest recession since the 1930s, outlasting the two record-holders, the mid-1970s and early 1980s downturns. Each of those recessions lasted 16 months. The current recession, which started in December 2007, would reach that milestone in April....
That's Bush's final gift to you, America -- as planned!
--more--"
