(H/Ts – JammieWearingFool, who has the train-wreck pic of the day, and Ed Morrissey)
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that non-farm employment continued to decline in April, this time by 539,000, and that the unemployment rate went up to 8.9%. Both JWF and Ed noted that actually masked couple of troubling items:
– Take out the 72,000-job increase in government payrolls and the drop is actually 611,000.
– Most of that 72,000-job government increase was due to temporary Census jobs.
JWF caught a very telling paragraph in the New York Times’ article:
A year ago, the loss of more than half a million jobs in a single month would have seemed like a disaster for the economy. On Friday, experts were calling it an improvement.
JWF points out that the change in outlook is due to the change of parties in the Oval Office. The only surprising thing is the Times is arrogant enough to all-but-admit that.
But wait, it gets worse. Jim Geraghty notes that the rise in the unemployment rate to 8.9%, at least this early into 2009, wasn’t exactly envisioned by the Treasury Department when they ran their “stress tests” of the top 19 financial institutions. Quoting a CNN story noting this little problem – “To take one example, the adverse scenario envisions the U.S. jobless rate gradually rising from 6.9% at the end of 2008 to 8.9% at the end of 2009.”
I hope you weren’t planning on buying Bank of America stock. Of course, you’ll probably be owning it shortly whether you wanted to or not.
Revisions/extensions (11:05 am 5/8/2009) – For even more depressing news, we go back to Jim from yesterday:
Number of people collecting unemployment benefits the week the stimulus was signed into law: 5.11 million.
Number of people collecting unemployment benefits as of May 2: 6.35 million.
