It's Getting Crowded Out Here

Updated below:

Looks like we are going to have to get a bigger pool...600k jobs lost last month...

The country moved into its second year of uninterrupted job losses last month, with companies shedding another 598,000 jobs and the unemployment rate moving up to 7.6 percent, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

They (economists) were forecasting a loss of about 540,000 jobs and a unemployment rate of 7.5 percent.

No sector was untouched and job losses were once again spread across both manufacturing and services industries, reinforcing the picture of an economy that is contracting at its fastest pace in decades.

Employers in the United States have shed jobs every month since January 2008, for an aggregate decline in payroll employment of 3.1 million.

The thing is that that number doesn't yet include those like me who were able to negotiate a little severance. I won't become 'offically' unemployed until next month when the severance will have run out and I get to apply for unemployment. I wonder how many are in my situation and are a month or two away from actually having to apply for unemployment? Half a million or more I would guess.

MeteorBlades has a much better explanation over at the Great Orange Satan.

Disastrous enough. And no end in sight. But the official rate, which the BLS calls U3, has been rejiggered over the years to exclude certain categories of jobless and part-time workers. It fails to provide an accurate measure of the real damage. A better measure is U6, a figure always reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but rarely reported by the traditional media because it would require 20 seconds of scrolling and an extra paragraph of explanation. U6 today was set at 13.9%.