The truth about the state of the world economies will be seen end of 2009

The problem (a random one) is that all government statistics understate reality substantially these days as the ersosion in prudence is a general issue. Still as this official numbers do drop in this fast paste shows that the momentum picks up and unfortunetely the worst is still to come as we are in the CAPEX (capital expenditure) season and the full impact will be felt in Jan.. The new administration will start as discussed in earlier blogs with a monstrous aid program but that are the same recipe's Japan tried in the 90's - their sucess was limited as almost everyone is aware. Problem is that we entered a cyclical downturn which gets exaggerated by the bubble's Greenspan,Clinton and Bush produced and covered up by false statistics and by the greedy and reckless behaviour of wallstreet and their supervisors ( including all politicians - as I did not here the democrats acting after they had control of the Congress 2 years ago and even before since it started under Clinton). The real problem is the world needs a general clean up from corruption and greed and therefor we need to dip much deeper into trouble otherwise the system just carries on doing what they still think is their righyt to do as Mr. Thain thinks he deserves a 10 mil. bonus just to name one incident or take Wagoner from GM ewho took Bonuses every year for wrecking an US icon with stupid methods of management every first grader would have done better.

Job losses will rise amis the monstrous aid program of Obama's administration as the losses of Banks will rise into the trillions officially - they still hide most of them with the help of the Treasury and FED and new losses are in the pipeline which will extend the credit crunch and force economies to go through a deeper contraction, even a likely depression as the government spending is limited by real resources. Printing money delays and worsens the basic effect as the debt has been rising now for 60 years and increasing it does not heal the basis for a healthy economy. As the effects of the monstrous aid programs vanish and the severe problems get realy visible the healing process is not going to start. The global aid programs are like painkillers they make us feel temporarily better but as we have to deal with more then a cold or headache a more substantial remedy is required which takes more than to spend a bit of money ( money nobody realy has ) - therefore I find the misleading promises of Obama very dangerous as hedoes not adress the real problems. The promised chnage is not visible yet and judging by the people he appointed it will not come but on the other hand we do not need to wait for people to do when we do not actively make them do what they ought to do - its not their choıice - democracy does not end after the elections it rather starts with them. The whole system stinks so we need to make sure the system knows they have to change - the president executes the will of the people not the other way round.

Grim Job Report Not Showing Full Picture

As bad as the headline numbers in Friday’s employment report were, they still made the job market look better than it really is.

CNBC.com

The unemployment rate reached its highest point since 1993, and overall employment fell by more than a half million jobs. Yet that was just the beginning. Thanks to the vagaries of the way that the government’s best-known jobs statistics are calculated, they have overlooked many workers who have been deeply affected by the current recession.

The number of people out of the labor force — meaning that they were neither working nor looking for work and that the government did not consider them unemployed — jumped by 637,000 last month, the Labor Department said. The number of part-time workers who said they wanted full-time work — all counted as fully employed — rose by an additional 621,000.

Take these people into account, and the job market may be in its worst condition since the early 1980s. It is still deteriorating rapidly, too.

Already, the share of men older than 20 with jobs was at its lowest point last month since 1983, and very close to the low point of the last 60 years. The share of women with jobs is lower than it was eight years ago, which never happened in previous decades.

Liz Perkins, 24 and the mother of four young children in Colorado Springs, began looking for work in October after she learned that her husband, James, was about to lose his job at a bed-making factory.

But the jobs she found either did not pay enough to cover child care or required her to work overnight. “I can’t do overnight work with four children,” she said. She has since stopped looking for work.

The family has paid its bills by dipping into its savings and borrowing money from relatives. But Ms. Perkins said that unless her husband found a job in the next three months, she feared the family would become homeless.

Even Wall Street economists, whose analysis usually comes shaded in rose, seemed taken aback by the report. Goldman Sachs called the new numbers “horrendous.” Others said “dreadful” and “almost indescribably terrible.” In a note to clients, Morgan Stanley economists wrote, “Quite simply, there was nothing good in this report.” HSBC forecasters said they now expected the Federal Reserve to reduce its benchmark interest rate all the way to zero.

Such language may sound out of step with a jobless rate that, despite its recent rise, remains at 6.7 percent; the rate exceeded 10 percent in the early 1980s. But over the last few decades, the jobless rate has become a significantly less useful measure of the country’s economic health.

That is because far more people than in the past fall into the gray area of the labor market — not having a job and not looking for one, but interested in working. This group includes many former factory workers who have been unable to find new work that pays nearly as well and are unwilling to accept a job that pays much less. Some get by with help from disability payments, while others rely on their spouses’ paychecks.

For much of the last year, the ranks of these labor force dropouts were not changing rapidly, said Thomas Nardone, a Labor Department economist who oversees the collection of the unemployment data. People who had lost their jobs generally began looking for new work. But that changed in November.