On one hand, it’s nice to see people agree with me. On the other hand, I wish the economy would turn around.
We’ve had 15 months of fewer jobs, pushing the unemployment rate nationally up to 8.5%. It is of course worse in some places than others. Remember, these figures don’t include people who simply never were able to find a job upon entering the workforce. If we use the most conservative number economists think we need for those new people, we’re talking about 1,875,000 jobless people unaccounted for. The actual number might be as high as 3,000,000. Nor do the official unemployment numbers include the millions of people who have given up looking for work. Some sources are predicting double digit unemployment unless we have “systemic reforms.”
Some companies are choosing to cut benefits such as 401k contributions rather than cutting more jobs. I think this is a sign that viable companies have already cut all the jobs they can and still conduct business.
As a direct result of increasing joblessness, we have 1 in every 10 Americans on Food Stamps. Yeah, I am guessing that any movement to make those people submit to random drug screening is dead.
Another direct result is a larger than expected growth in bankruptcy filings. A quite understandable result of that is credit card companies slashing the credit lines of people who have accounts in good standing. They don’t want to find themselves on the hook for money that people may not be able to pay in the future. Of course the other side of that is that a credit card may mean the difference between making it through a rough patch and economic disaster. Paid back with interest. A true double-edged sword of Damocles.
Perhaps a factor, perhaps a result, we now find out that there is a serious delinquency problem not just on sub-prime mortgages, but standard ones as well! Would they have ever been a problem if not for the subprime mess or the job losses? I doubt anyone will ever know. The important thing to remember is that this bodes ill for the housing market on the national level until the economy recovers and perhaps a year beyond as the properties in question are foreclosed and resold.
Robert Reich is just the latest economist to go out there and call it a Depression. He joins The Economist magazine (hardly an alarmist lot), Eric Sprott, Frederic Mishkin (who says this is actually worse than a depression), and others.
There are a couple of bright spots. In truth, they are really “not quite as dismal” spots, but let’s take what we can get. Some companies are offering “free services” to the unemployed. Locally, Kinkos has offered resume printing, and a daycare has offered a free day so people can go to job interviews.
Another good thing is that for the first time in some years, Congress has actually passed a budget before the beginning of the fiscal year in October. It’s not the final version, and the Republicans are still calling for “restraint” (without offering much in the way of details beyond “spend less”), but it’s something. It’s worth noting what happens to our deficits when the Republicans get their way on the budget. So much for “fiscal responsibility” and “reducing debt.”
At least Wall Street is happy.
In Closing: the ACLU guide to the rights of women; which is very much in contrast to the “rights” women “enjoy” in Afghanistan; two items from Seeing the Forest on food are don’t listen to scary people who say the feds want to take away your right to garden and the effects of being a vegetarian for just one day; your meds might interact with grapefruit; North Dakota finally realizes it’s a bad idea for Zygotes to have the full range of human rights even if you are “Pro-life”; now that we know the Binghamton shooter was a disgruntled Vietnamese man who had trouble learning English, can we stop giving lip service to the nut to claimed responsibility in the name of the Taliban?; and finally, Defective Yeti’s always hilarious collected Bad Movie Reviews. I don’t know how he has the patience to read the reviews in the first place.