Bush Administration Celebrates Only 20,000 Jobs Lost in April

I agree.  Under normal circumstances, this might be good news, but from what I've been reading and hearing we have a horrendous mortgage and other credit crisis going on in this nation.

Excerpt NY Times report "U.S. Sheds Fewer Jobs Than Expected ":

“The good news is it strongly argues that this downturn will be mild and short lived,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “As long as businesses hold the line on their layoffs, the economy will weaken, but it won’t unravel.”

This rosy view is given by someone with no interest in keeping the stock and commodities markets  at their unnaturally high levels, right?

And to be fair the rest of the article at the Times shows that the reporter and even Mr. Zandi have their eyes more widely open than the above quote makes them appear to.  Though with what they know you wonder why that quote was even expressed and used.

Interestingly, the journalist, Peter S. Goodman reports that the numbers of 'non-farm' jobs is lower than six months ago, and that such a phenomenon has proven in the past to correlate with being in a recession or just emerging from one.  He is, of course, using language carefully, I assume that's because the Bush administration recently declared that the economy grew .6% in the last quarter and that proved we were not in a recession. (See Northwest [Illinois] Herald  Is U.S. in a recession? Not quite, federal economists say which also shows some skepticism over the Bush administration's claims that there is no recession.

Please read the reports at source for all the details. 

I saw a graphic on the front of our local paper (which the once might LA Times is becoming these days) that showed consumer confidence falling off the chart. 

 That may be why the  Northwest Herald (as linked above) noted:

Many analysts were predicting that the gross domestic product would weaken a bit more in the first quarter. Earlier this year, some thought the economy would lurch into reverse in the first quarter. Now, they said they believed that it likely would happen during the current April-to-June period.

Then again the Bush administration has been caught lying about job creation, historical savings rate, and are suspected by some in business to have been lying about inflation rates, so who knows if their GDP numbers are correct?  

tags: jobs report  labor department  jobs lost  recession  gdp  downturn  

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