Exhibit A, today’s jobs report:
Private-sector employers shed 693,000 jobs in December, a private employment service said on Wednesday in a report that was far worse than expected and pointed to more ugly news from the government’s jobs data due later this week.
The drop, much bigger than the revised 476,000 private sector jobs lost in November, is consistent with about a 670,000 fall in December non-farm payrolls, said Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC, which jointly develops the private sector employment report with ADP Employer Services.
Exhibit B, outsourcing accounting fraud:
Satyam Computer Services, a leading Indian outsourcing company that serves more than a third of the Fortune 500 companies, significantly inflated its earnings and assets for years, the chairman and co-founder said Wednesday, roiling Indian stock markets and throwing the industry into turmoil.
The chairman, Ramalinga Raju, resigned after revealing that he had systematically falsified accounts as the company expanded from a handful of employees into a back office giant with a work force of 53,000 and operations in 66 countries.
I still say that as long as we remember that the recession’s all in our heads, that it was all caused by deadbeat minority homeowners, and that FDR’s New Deal policies were an abysmal failure, we’re going to ride out the Obama Depression just fine.
Update: @Punchy (from Lew Rockwell):
If you keep up with LRC, you probably already know that a major role of the FDIC is to give the public a false sense of confidence. Typically the FDIC keeps a little over fifty billion dollars in its Deposit Insurance Fund to cover the deposits of account holders in the event of bank failure. According to the data published on September 30, 2008, there is just under $8.8 trillion deposited in US banks. The fact that the FDIC has squat for cash to cover bank failures isn’t really news. So long as there are only three or four bank failures each year, the FDIC is able to cover the losses, and life goes on.
In 2008, however, there were more than three or four bank failures. There were twenty-five in total. As a result, the Deposit Insurance Fund has been drawn down to about $35 billion, of which approximately $20 billion is liquid. That’s still okay so long as there aren’t many more bank failures, but each quarter the numbers are looking more and more dreadful. Last we heard from the FDIC, there were 117 banks on its secret “troubled” list, which matches pretty well with my list of banks with incredibly high Texas ratios. If we add up the deposits for those troubled banks, we get a value of $76 billion. So, the FDIC has $20 billion to cover 76 billion dollars of deposits in banks that are on the brink of collapse. Things are looking pretty bleak for the FDIC.
Take things from Rockwell with a grain of salt but I’ve heard the same rumors elsewhere.
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