There was lots of discussion about charts comparing job losses in the current recessions to other recessions since WWII. Either chart you look at tells the same story - this recession is already very long.
These charts are from Calculated Risk and The Big Picture. The Big Picture also has the same data indexed to 100, which shows the severity of the current loss of jobs. When viewed as indexed to 100 (which by the way is the the most informative way to look at this data, you can clearly see that this is a horrible recession for job destruction.
Each of these downward sloping lines represents enormous amount of human pain. Families destroyed, houses lost, careers halted, all because of a misunderstanding of the money creation and credit process.
The inflection points at the bottoms of each line are where economy began to create jobs. Look at either chart and compare the current recession. You will see that this recession, unless we are adding jobs in January, is already the third longest before any recovery began.
The amount of time we have been loosing jobs is the third longest on since WWII. Most recessions have already turned around at this point, and were beginning to add jobs on a monthly basis.
Look at the charts, at the time when employment began to turn around and gain on a month over month basis. For losing jobs, this recession is already very long. And we were starting from an already depressed level resulting from the poor Bush economic performance.
Our first line of defense against economic slowdown is monetary policy, or rate cuts. Usually monetary policy takes between 9 and 12 months to take effect, from the time of the first rate cut. The first rate cut in this series was in September of 2007, so almost 15 months ago.
With almost 600,000 jobs lost last month, I would say that monetary policy is not having much of an effect.
This recession will be very long and deep unless we significantly expand the amount of stimulus. Do not believe me even though I said this in December. Many smart people are saying we need more stimulus.
Robert Reich is claiming that the republicans are trying to push off the stimulus so that they can have a shot at the 2010 mid term elections.