OK, if you haven't seen this yet, brace yourself; it's worse than expected (and we expected pretty bad):
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081205/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/financial_meltdown
“[…] employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years […]"
By the way, that's around twice what the experts were predicting. And the most dire warnings had us around 300,000 job losses per month by the end of the year - optimistic, it seems!
“As companies throttled back hiring, the unemployment rate bolted from 6.5 percent in October to 6.7 percent last month, a 15-year high."
Remember, that's official unemployment, which doesn't count millions of people by design.
“These numbers are shocking," said economist Joel Naroff [… And ...] The unemployment rate would have moved even higher if not for the exodus of 422,000 people from the work force. […]”
That means they gave up, so the feds just stop counting them. That happens every month, but usually not this many. With "underemployment" estimated around 11%, the real deal is a whole lot spookier than these spooky numbers!
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