DC follies

When Main Street needed stimulus, they gave the money to Wall Street.

When we needed financial reform (smackdown punishment), they (sloowwwwwwly) brought us Health Care "reform".

We need a Jobs Bill / SBA loan guarantees, but they give us Finance Industry "reform".

Soooooo... when something to stimulate business and jobs finally rolls around, how deep into the new Great Depression quagmire will we be?

Hope, Change = Bad timing, Making it worse.

double dip in housing?

Does all this Doom and Gloom news just evil self-fulfilling prophecy?

...or simple observations that help us in preparing for collapse?

yes and yes.

"de-incentivizing" growth...

...the Obama Formula

Trillions for Defense, trillions for entitlements - stratospheric spending. What's gonna happen?

unemployment rising

I got nothing snarky to add. This is all pretty clear.

Below is a comment from a post at the James Pethokoukis blog at Reuters - 12 reasons unemployment is going to (at least) 12 percent

I’ve had businesses for 30 years.

This is all very simple. Businesspeople are not stupid. They aren’t hiring because:

1. They don’t know what tax increases are coming.

2. They don’t know what new burdensome regulations are coming.

3. They don’t know what changes to the health care system are coming, and if perhaps they will be responsible for everyone’s COBRA or similar for years.

4. They don’t know if it will be harder to fire people in the future.

5. They don’t know if every employee will be allowed to join a union, increasing costs and headaches.

6. They don’t know what new procedures will be invented to upend the bond markets completely, overturning centuries of settled law.

7. They don’t know if Washington will unilaterally cut their compensation.

8. They don’t know if cap-and-trade will double their energy costs.

And on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

I can’t imagine hiring anyone until all this nonsense shakes out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see unemployment above 13%.

I can hold off generating taxable activity a lot longer than Democrats can retain Congress, that’s for damn sure.
- Posted by Chester White

The Recession is OVER!!!!

The DOW is holding 10,000 this week. Yay!

Let's look at other figures.

1 out of 136 homes in the U.S. are in foreclosure.

Over 970,000 homes entered foreclosure in the 3rd Quarter of 2009.

oil prices are spiking. (speculation much?)

Sound familiar?

Add to that the "4 week moving average" of new jobless claims cresting 530,000...

...and you got a world of hurt.

as icing to the cake let's add: no specific and measurable finance regulation  and   nor reform of any kind.

let's chant it now: "DOUBLE DIP! DOUBLE DIP! DOUBLE DIP!"

unemployment numbers, august 2009

Less job loss claims, but higher unemployment rate?

WHUT?

Last month's report with the record job losses minus the underemployed and no-longer-looking-for-jobs made the the rate dip one-tenth of a percent. Now this month's report has a different spin of Voodoo

"The pace of U.S. job losses hit a one-year low last month but the unemployment rate jumped to a 26-year high of 9.7 percent"

So how does lower job losses this time cause the unemployment rate to go up? Mystery.

Include the UNDER-employed in the figure (crap part time jobs due to necessity... BLS's "U-6" statistic) and you get the real depressing figures:

"a record 16.8 percent in August from 16.3 percent in July"

I won't even go into the stats for minorities, young Americans (18-29)... and worst of all: young blacks and hispanics.

But if you want to gaze at the depressing reality yourself, look HERE.

The last time it was this grim, I was the young minority.