Let’s get all these economic stories out in one place so we can look at them as a whole.
Economist’s View has charts showing that even as the economy has grown, the American worker has gotten very little out of it.
CNN tells us that there is “no jobs turnaround on [the] horizon“, and that was before Friday’s abysmal numbers. At that point, the Department of Labor had admitted that our economy has lost 463,000 this year through July. Then the August numbers came in and “deflate[d] Wall Street“. It has officially gotten to the point where the official statistics can no longer hide unemployment: August’s loss of 84,000 brings our unemployment rate to a 5 year high of 6.1%, and once you include “marginally attached workers”, real unemployment is over 10%. That’s a huge jump, and makes many economists think this has to be a recession. Some economists are making fun of other economists who say it’s not here yet.
There’s a lot of chatter about how much, in what manner, and why the official stats are manipulated and whether that’s actually a good thing.
I am not the only one trying to put everything in one place. Here’s Citizen Carrie and Cogitamus’s Sir Charles (Cogitamus is Latin… should that be Cogitami?). Robert Reich falls back on an old line to describe the big picture: It’s the economy, stupid.
I haven’t even gotten to the ballooning of the FDIC watchlist, nor the expected Federal takeover of Fannie and Freddie (more on that over at BridgetMagnus.com).
In closing: hurricane tracking website; on private contractors in Iraq; crashing a motorcycle going 239 MPH is certain death, but what a way to go; what were you wearing in 1977; Happy Birthday Little Prince.