Everybody Must Get Manic! or In Our Free Falling Economy, One Thing is Rising: The Unemployment Rate--- So Why Not Spread Some Seasonal Cheer & Happiness?

by Damozel | So in November, 533,000 people lost their jobs---the largest lost in a single month since December 1974.  (NYT)  The recession the people who get to make these calls finally admitted we're in (Recession Finally Announced)  has now  been in progress for 12 months, making it "the longest since the Great Depression." (NYT)  

The jobless rate was up from 6.5 percent in October. The job losses far exceeded the 350,000 figure that was the consensus expectation of economists. (NYT)

Checking out Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman (nope; never gonna get tired of writing that) won't cheer you up any.  Yesterday, before the report was published, he correctly predicted its conclusion, and commented:

I’ve been ruminating over economic prospects for next year, and I’m getting scared....So here’s what I’m wondering: will it, in fact, even be possible to pull the economy out of its nosedive before unemployment goes into double digits? I’m starting to wonder.  (Krugman)

Others who know something about the economy are in an equally bleak frame of mind:

"Context is everything," Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said as hearings on the auto bailout began. A failure of the automakers amid already steep job losses "would be an unmitigated disaster."

The latest jobs report "is bad news. No matter how you look at it is really, really bad news," former Treasury Secretary John Snow said this morning on the CNBC cable television network. (WaPo)

Even before They admitted we're in a recession, things was tough, my friends, for the rest of us.

Some 2.7 million jobs now have been eliminated since the economy moved into recession a year ago -- nearly 1.3 million of them in the last three months, following Labor Department revisions that showed even steeper employment losses in September and October than initially reported.

Currently more than 10.3 million people are out of work, the Labor Department said. (WaPo)

The only note of reassurance:  Peggy Noonan, Crown Princess of Wall Street, or at least the Wall Street Journal, said last week that she doesn't see any sign yet that things are getting worse when she emerges from her palace to walk among the commoners.  I'm clinging to that, so much so that I am foregoing the usual joy and drop-jawed amazement to be had in reading her ruminations in case she's taken it back.  DON'T WANT TO KNOW DON'T WANT TO KNOW DON'T WANT TO KNOW....

Meanwhile, The New York Times is, as we used to say the last time we lost this many jobs at once, "riding a righteous bummer."

“We have recorded the largest decline in consumer confidence in our history,” said Richard T. Curtin, director of the Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, which started its polling in the 1950s. “It is being driven down by a host of factors: falling home and stock prices, fewer work hours, smaller bonuses, less overtime and disappearing jobs.”

The jobless rate was up from 6.5 percent in October. The job losses far exceeded the 350,000 figure that was the consensus expectation of economists.

Over all, the job losses since January now total more than 1.9 million, with most coming in the last three months as consumers and businesses cut back sharply in response to the worsening credit crisis....

The manufacturing sector has been particularly hard hit, losing more than half a million jobs this year. That is nearly half the 1.2 million jobs lost since employment peaked in December and, in January, began its uninterrupted decline. The cutbacks seem likely to accelerate as the three Detroit automakers close more factories and shrink payrolls even more as they try to qualify for the federal loans they asked Congress this week to approve.

While manufacturing has led the way, the job cuts are rising in nearly every sector of the economy....

The latest jobs report came during a week of compelling evidence that the American economy is falling precipitously... [E]conomists are estimating that the gross domestic product is contracting at an annual rate of 4 percent or more in the fourth quarter, after a decline of 0.3 percent in the third quarter. 

Meanwhile, Congress, with Obama's support, is preparing to enact a stimulus package by late January.  That's because, as The Washington Post unreassuringly says, that the loss of jobs---2.7 million in the last year, says The Washington Post unreassuringly---" now seen as one of the chief challenges in reviving the economy."  Jobs are disappearing in all sectors."

So Congress wants to implement that stimulus package by late January:

Many economists consider such investments an effective way to counteract, through federally financed employment, the layoffs and hiring freezes spreading through the private sector.“Basically $100 billion of public investment in such things as roads, bridges and levees would generate two million jobs,” Robert N. Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, said. “That would offset the two million jobs that we are now on track to lose by early next year.”

 But the Krugman-bear said:

Infrastructure spending will take time to get going — a new Goldman Sachs report suggests that projects that are “shovel-ready” are probably only a few tens of billions worth, and that a larger effort would take much of a year to get going. Meanwhile, it’s very questionable how much effect tax rebates will have on consumer demand. So it may be hard for stimulus to get much traction until late 2009 — and that’s even if Congress goes along, which may be a problem given all the bad analysis and disinformation out there. (Krugman)

That's in case you were thinking, "Phew.  Congress and Obama are on it."

Consumers are, selfishly, holding on to what little money they've got, not even buying Christmas presents.  That's how you know things is really tough here in America:  people of all ages stop buying toys.

With all that said, you'd probably like some cheering news.  The Washington Post, twinkling like Santa's eyes in the poem, says that happiness---if you can find a reason for it or arrange to hang out with someone who has---spreads like the flu.  The contagiousness of happiness has been verified by "a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other."

The study of more than 4,700 people who were followed over 20 years found that people who are happy or become happy boost the chances that someone they know will be happy. The power of happiness, moreover, can span another degree of separation, elevating the mood of that person's husband, wife, brother, sister, friend or next-door neighbor.

One person's happiness can affect another's for as much as a year, the researchers found....

Furthermore, the unhappiness virus is far weaker and spreads far more slowly!  Okay, that settles it.  From now on, less Krugman and more relentlessly optimistic and willfully blind people like Peggy Noonan.   Furthermore, I'm going to stop right there so as not to read the part where the article---inevitably---starts to qualify itself. 

Tra la!   Off to spread some forced cheer! 

In the meantime, if you're now riding a bummer too, you couldn't do better than to go here:

The Economy is Sinking Like a Stone, So Enjoy This Saxophone-Playing, Tango-Dancing Walrus

Memeorandum has more on the loss of jobs here.

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