600k jobs lost:
The country moved into its second year of uninterrupted job losses last month, with companies shedding another 598,000 jobs and the unemployment rate moving up to 7.6 percent, the Labor Department reported on Friday.
Economists had forecast a loss of 540,000 jobs and a unemployment rate of 7.5 percent.
Job losses were once again spread across both manufacturing and services industries, reinforcing the picture of an economy that is contracting at its fastest pace in decades.
Employers in the United States have shed jobs every month since January 2008, for an aggregate decline in payroll employment of 3.1 million.
Read the whole thing.
Jon H
I read recently, I think on Calculated Risk, that home ownership is back to 2000 levels.
The Bush Ownership Society is already gone.
chrome agnomen
good news for mccain
dmsilev
Allow me to channel Fox News for a second: "The Obama Recession continues to worsen. Will Congress allow tax cuts to save us?"
-dms
Punchy
I can’t believe Obama’s been in office only 3 weeks and he already has this country mired in a recession.
Nicole
I caught the update on Morning Joe (I was not fast enough making the switch AK (After Krugman) to local news) and listening to their idiot news person attempting to spin the jobs loss into good news was pretty mind-boggling- "Five hundred ninety-five thousand jobs lost- but hey, forecasts called for six hundred thousand so that’s much better than expected! They said unemployment might hit 8 percent but it’s only 7.5! And that number is calculated differently than jobs lost, anyway!" I’m sure it was followed up by a discussion on how cutting capital gains tax would fix everything but I had turned off the TV.
Brick Oven Bill
Oh, you guys are silly. Things are fine.
The government added six thousand jobs last month.
Education and Health Care added FIFTY FOUR THOUSAND jobs last month.
These sectors, I have been tracking for a while now, these are the healthy sectors. They constantly grow. Spending is stimulus, you know. This is the whole point.
The Other Steve
It’s 598,000, not 600k! Why do you feel the need to exaggerate!?
zzyzx
What? Are my current nightmares not bad enough for you?
Robin G.
Clearly none of this would have happened if the Republicans had been in power.
TheHatOnMyCat
More tax cuts are clearly needed.
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
Here in Canada, we were expecting losses of about 40,000 for January. The actual number was 129,000. 71,000 of those losses were here in Ontario.
And just last fall, Harper was telling us we would ride this out pretty well.
Conservatively Liberal
Bah, who needs jobs when you could have tax cuts! Medical costs too high? Tax cuts! Got a flat tire? Tax cuts!
Tax cuts(!) fix everything, really! Leaky faucet? What else?
Tax cuts!
Josh Hueco
@Buffalo Bill:
6,000 more government jobs in a workforce of over 150,000,000? And increases in education and health care?!? What’s a good Freed’m(tm)-lurvin’ wingtard to do? Quick, say your prayers to Saints Uncle Miltie and Aynal Aynnie because America is doooooooomed!
TheHatOnMyCat
I can’t comment on your misgivings. I have a hunch that more research would address them, or most of them.
I can only comment on my own impressions of what we are doing here. One, I am not eager to recreate the Great Depression and do "public works" following that model. That was a different world, and I don’t think trying to recreate it is a good idea. We don’t need massive public works, the infrastructure is already there and improving it is not the same as creating it. In other words, we don’t really need to build a lot of roads, or dams. We do need to improve the condition of existing roads and bridges.
But the thing is, we can’t get to stopping a depression by fixing bridges and schools. There aren’t enough of them, the types of jobs aren’t the ones we need to emphasize, the projects aren’t quick turnarounds, etc.
I haven’t studied the details of this Senate bill, there hasn’t been time. If the debate is whether we need to take time for ordinary people to digest it all, versus get a good but not perfect bill passed and signed, I am in favor of the latter, and if that makes us a little nervous, so be it.
Bottom line for Juicers? Nut up, support the bill, and let’s move forward.
D0n Camillo
Approaching meteor about to wipe out the world? Tax cuts!
Poopyman
And at the moment (10:30 AM) the Dow is up 138 on the news. So after all the talk of perhaps 500K, were people’s expectations actually much much worse?
Damned liberal reality!
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
I heard a local commentator speculate that both American and Canadian markets are up because investors now expect our respective stimulus packages to be increased. but who knows, really?
Robin G.
Ebola outbreak? Tax cuts, obviously.
Legalize
Tax cuts: use as a desert topping and an oven cleaner!
Davis X. Machina
Don’t think of those people as newly unemployed, think of them as newly empowered. Ihink of them as added to the ranks of potential entrepreneurs. Don’t think of the loss of jobs, think of the gain in FREEDOM!
(Can I have the AEI job now, can I? Can I?)
Davis X. Machina
IIRC, you need about 150,000 net new jobs per month just to accommodate people entering the workforce for the first time….
Legalize
Think about all the free time the recently-liberated-from-employment will have to spend with their families; to finally train for that marathon; to get some yard work done; and to fix up those Italian sports cars that have just been sitting around in their garages!
jcricket
Bingo. It’s not perfect, but studying it more won’t make it perfect. It’ll likely make it worse, lower confidence, and set the tone for endless debates while hundreds of thousands lose jobs and go hungry or homeless over the next few years.
I’m honestly as worried that the Democrats find their footing by getting this bill passed as I am about the actual contents of the bill passing. If Democrats continue to act like wounded deer, Republicans will continue gumming up the works/fucking shit up when we can no longer afford for them to do so (if we ever could).
BTW – unemployment is likely actually twice the official rate. Did you see the post on DailyKos about how the data has been manipulated for years to exclude things most of us would consider unemployment? It’s like how inflation measures no longer include energy costs, food, or the cost of buying a house.
Good times.
Notorious P.A.T.
Read it? I’m living it.
Krista
You mean Harper’s well-planned "Look at me, I’m impersonating an ostrich!" strategy didn’t work?
I guess when you’re constantly waiting for your buddy Bush to tell you what to do, and your buddy isn’t there anymore, it’s hard to come up with thoughts of your own.
Notorious P.A.T.
Link
TenguPhule
Please keep in mind this is only the first estimate.
$10 says this gets revised higher next month when they do the final numbers.