The American economy shed another 263,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, reinforcing a broad assumption that many more months of lean times lie ahead for working people.
The latest snapshot of the nation’s job market released by the Labor Department on Friday amplified the notion that the recession has probably ended, as a technical matter. Though the job market continued to worsen, the pace of deterioration remained markedly slower than earlier in the year, when roughly 700,000 jobs a month were disappearing.
Yet the report added to the sentiment that the economic expansion, which is probably under way, will be weak and tentative, with scarce paychecks and anxiety remaining prominent features of American life well into next year.
“This is a weak report,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “The rate of job loss has tapered off, but we still haven’t reached the point where businesses are willing to hire.”
“Capturing particular notice was a preliminary revision to the assumptions that the Labor Department used in a survey of private employers. The department disclosed that, in March 2009, the economy held 824,000 fewer jobs than it previously believed, making an already bleak picture worse.”
Very sobering.
Several people I work with were shocked to find that the once bustling corporate IT facility across the road from where we work was empty. It once housed several hundred people monitoring networks for large multinationals, operations that have moved to Pakistan and China. Now perhaps 50 report to work there for a pair of local businesses that continue to maintain their servers there.
On the bright side, when Pakistan falls to Islamicists and if China has some political or natural disaster there is at least an empty stripped building with wiring and power here in the states to fall back on. But it’s too bad bean counters don’t figure in national or local stability when they move jobs places.
The absolutely essential thing in creating a real economic recovery is to kill the Fed and return to a hard currency. If you no longer have the power to print money at will, you can no longer rape and pillage the American people to turn over trillions of dollars to the International Financiers, finance wars to further enrich those same International Financiers and pay for all the hare brained socialist schemes politicians come up with to buy the support of special interest groups. And yes, the solution is that simple. Think about it.
A little further food for thought. If there had been no Fed there would have been no bubbles, no bailouts and no massive trillions of dollars in deficits facing us and future generations.
It appears the American economy has yet to notice those millions of jobs Obama and Biden tell us this administration saved over the past nine months. Of course, I have no idea how one would ever be able to measure the number of jobs saved, but since Obama and Biden keep telling us what wonderful success they are having saving jobs it is quite remarkable the American economy has not responded positively to such good news.