It's all an illusion, you may think the economy is coming out of a recession/depression but were not, the economy will experience growth due to the printing of monopoly money however the economy will not be able to stand on it's own once they decide to remove all the excess liquidity from the system. Once an economy gets so used to these types of handouts, removing them is just impossible.
I'm so tired of the hype, the commercials, the deals, people waiting hours in line to buy a third 62" flat panel tv they can't afford. When does it stop, when do consumers finally wake up and decide christmas is nothing more than a drive to help fuel the economies bottom line.
It is not that bad, first of, business(private sectors) has already cut its work force into the bones, the rest of them are all governmental employee( about 20M, government has difficulty to pay them, so deficits it. lol). If there are any merit in The Shadow Government Statistics, its number will peak soon, it's just hardly to imagine this number goes over 30%.
the key to see if there is a recovery taking place in employment is if temp worker hiring is increasing, outside of holiday hiring
Although I am obviously a cynic when it comes to government #s - I agree with your point. We will not know for at least a couple more months.
actually retail #'s threw yesterday seem terrible and even year over year compared to an armageddon 2008 don't look good.lets talk about jobs. in order to have the unemployment rate to hang around 10% there must be around 150-200k jobs created each and every month. so to get the rate down to 8% the economy will have to add 400-500k jobs for 1 1/2-2 straight years. the problem is many of these jobs gone forever. first co's will add temps like crazy for months on end. then if permanent jobs needed many jobs will be overseas. then the american who needs costly benefits will be hired. but thats 12 months about and contingent on a super strong economy which will be very tough to see. i truely think the day of crazy consumption is over. people feel a vunerability they never felt before thus even if they're doing well will save more.what just amazes me is wall street thinks this is over after 1 lousy down year in the greatest economic collapse since 1930? hell no we're in the 2-3 inning overall as this will be along hard struggle.
At least that's what Wall Street wants you to believe at this point or else companies like Goldman Sachs can't make money. (Replace "make" with any other word you deem fit.)
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/12/if-economy-lost-jobs-why-did.html http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/12/unemployment-record-number-unemployed.html Some interesting analysis there; I am concerned still that it may be a long, hard slog.