"We’re in almost a panic stage right now," said Ethan Harris, co-head of U.S. economic research at Barclays Capital Inc. in New York. "Companies are readjusting their labor force to match a deeply depressed economy."
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports this morning that the official unemployment rate has risen to 8.1%. In other words, 651,000 workers have been added to the official unemployment roster in the past month. For a total number of ex-workers of 12.5 million. About 4.4 million jobs have been lost in the past 12 months.
That 651,000 is, according to Bloomberg, the biggest drop since October 1949, and that month's numbers were exacerbated when half a million steelworkers went on strike.
The 8.1% rate is, however, the U3 number. The broader U6 number is 14.8%, up from 13.9% last month. The megamedia rarely reports it even though it gives a much better picture of the real situation. As Barry Ritholtz says: U3 is now comprised in a way that merely repeating it without a slew of caveats borders on fraud.
The BLS definition of U3 is "Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force." The BLS categorizes U6 as "Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers."
Employed "part time for economic reasons" covers workers who would love to have a full-time job - who may need full-time work to pay all the bills - but can only find something part time. "Marginally attached workers" are those available for work, who have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months, but who aren't included in the unemployed count because they have not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the most recent BLS survey.
Terrible news any way you look at it. No doubt the Foxagandists and other members of the megamedia's talking heads brigade will soon be calling it the Obama Recession.
[Updated]: The payroll drop in January was revised up to 655,000 from 598,000 and December now shows a 681,000 drop, up from the 577,000 previously estimated.
[Update No. 2]: Giving credit where it is due: The New York Times has a nifty animated graphic that shows U3 and U6.
Want some more bad news? Here it is:
Economists polled by Bloomberg last month forecast consumer spending will contract through the first six months of this year after sliding in the last half of 2008. Purchases have not contracted for four consecutive quarters since records began in 1947.
If the recession persists through the first half of this year, it would be the longest since the Great Depression. The economy shrank at a 6.2 percent pace in the fourth quarter of 2008, the weakest performance since 1982.
Want some more bad news? Foreclosures rise again
Figures released Thursday show that nearly 12 percent of all Americans with a mortgage — a record 5.4 million homeowners — were at least one month late or in foreclosure at the end of last year.
That's up from 10 percent at the end of the third quarter, and up from 8 percent at the end of 2007. In addition, the numbers now include many once-qualified borrowers who took out fixed-rate loans.
Data from the Mortgage Bankers Association also showed that a stunning 48 percent of homeowners who have subprime, adjustable-rate mortgages are behind on their payments or in foreclosure.
About half of Americans who own a home have mortgages.
Want some more bad news? Food stamp enrollment jumps to record 31.8 million
A record 31.8 million Americans received food stamps at the latest count, an increase of 700,000 people in one month with the United States in recession, government figures showed on Thursday.
Food stamps, which help poor people buy groceries, are the major U.S. anti-hunger program, forecast to cost at least $51 billion in this fiscal year ending September 30, up $10 billion from fiscal 2008.
That "latest count" is for December, and you can be certain that it's worse now. Food stamps are, of course, one of the Great Society programs that most elected Republicans didn't want in 1964, when the program passed, and most elected Republicans now seek to cut at every opportunity.
Giving people a subsidy to buy food for their themselves and their kids makes them lazy, you see, because it's such a bonanza.
Food stamps, paid on a sliding scale according to income, average $115 a month per individual, and $255 a month per household.
Want some more bad news? The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that states are doing a lousy job of getting food to children who need it. And there are ever more of them what with all these jobs being lost. The program, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out is called "direct certification." It is supposed "ensure that the 9 million school-age children in households receiving [food stamp] benefits are automatically enrolled for free school meals. School districts rely on detailed information on households’ income collected by the [food stamp] agency so families can bypass the standard school meals application process. Children in households receiving SNAP benefits were already eligible for free meals; the new requirement ensures that they are enrolled for free meals."
However, requirements need proper implementation, and the USDA found that:
States vary widely in the share of children eligible for direct certification who are actually enrolled that way; in 16 states, at least two in five children who could have benefited from direct certification missed out.
Contrary to common belief, many of the poor children missed by direct certification are not enrolled for free meals based on a paper application but instead end up not receiving the free meals they need.
Rush Limbaugh, of course, knows just how evil it is that the USDA is trying to get this good to these kids. As he said not so long ago:
I think you might then say that the obesity crisis could be the fault of government, liberal government. Food stamps, all those -- you know, I'm gonna tell you people a story. I -- just, well, the government, you could say, is killing these people because we know obesity kills, and the government's killing the poor.
It's going to be a long rec depression.