The Terrible Jobs Report

Total job losses since the first of the year are now 438,000. That’s a loss of 73,000 a month. The economy needs to CREATE 125,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth.

In other words, this hole is getting deeper.

Consumers have no money left. This is the first consumer-led recession in over twenty years. Consumer-led recessions are worse than the normal kind, where the Fed has overshot by raising interest rates too high or corporations have pulled back their spending. Consumer-led recessions are deeper and longer, which makes the case for major infrastructure spending. (The normal worry with infrastructure spending as a stimulus is the lag effect – by the time the spending gets into the system and creates jobs, it’s too late. But not this time.)