Easy Times (10/6/10)

Remember how Red Barry would seize upon a net private sector employment increase of a single job as "proof" that the economy was "moving in the right direction"?  Even though we need a hundred thousand new jobs a month just to keep the unemployment rate stable, and more than that to reduce it?  It wasn't much of a fig leaf - really, more like a fig seed - but it was all he had, and he flogged it like Jim Kaveizel in Passion of the Christ.

So much for the fig seed:

Private employers []expectedly cut 39,000 jobs in September after an upwardly revised gain of 10,000 in August, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.

The August figure was originally reported as a loss of 10,000.

The median of estimates from thirty-eight economists surveyed by Reuters for the ADP Employer Services report, jointly developed with Macroeconomic Advisers LLC, was for a rise of 24,000 private-sector jobs in September.

I took out the "un", BTW; I'm tired of bitching about it, so I'm just going to fix Obamedia economic stories from now on rather than keep bursting capillaries in aggravation.

If they were actual journalists, one of them would ask The One if this means that the economy is now "officially" headed in the wrong direction.  At least it'd give him another chance to crap on Bush for old time's sake.

Besides, with what this portends for Friday's preliminary unemployment pure guess, and further bad tidings for next year, I imagine he can use all the cheer he can get:

“We see two main scenarios,” analysts led by Jan Hatzius, the New York-based chief U.S. economist at the company, wrote in an e-mail to clients. “A fairly bad one in which the economy grows at a 1.5% to 2% rate through the middle of next year and the unemployment rate rises moderately to 10%, and a very bad one in which the economy returns to an outright recession.”

The Federal Reserve will probably move to spur growth as soon as its next meeting on November 2-3, Hatzius said. Expectations for central bank action have already led to lower interest rates, higher stock prices and a weaker dollar, according to Goldman, one of the eighteen primary dealers that are required to bid at government debt sales.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his fellow policy makers are debating whether to increase Treasury purchases to spur the U.S. economy by keeping borrowing costs low. U.S. five-year yields dropped to a record 1.1755% today amid signs the recovery is losing momentum.

The “fairly bad” outlook for slow growth and rising unemployment without a recession will probably be the one that occurs, the e-mail said.

It said that so that when the "very bad" scenario does, in fact, occur, the Obamedia can use their favorite bleeping adverb again.

Helicopter Ben and his fellow trained seals, BTW, have already decided to "monetize the debt" (again) so that if the economy starts showing some signs of life after the Republicans re-take Congress, inflation will explode like Faisal Shazad's intended Times Square fuel-air car bomb, and Red Barry will have another crisis to exploit.  That'll cheer him up LOTS more than crapping on Bush, which he probably does in his sleep.

He'd be well advised to take better care of SOTUS, though.  As naked as the Emperor is, he can't have his identity falling down on the job, and giving "transparency" an even worse name than the Obamidency has already.