Unemployment Rate Hits 7.6% -- Worse Than Expected.

The new unemployment numbers are out:

January job losses: 598,000

Job losses from Nov-Jan: 1.8 million

Unemployment rate: 7.6%

Unemployed workers: 11.6 million

In a word they are ugly.

So while Republicans continue to play political games with the future of this nation, the number of Americans who have lost their jobs is skyrocketing. The Numbers were worse than expected:

U.S. employers slashed 598,000 jobs in January, the deepest cut in payrolls in 34 years as the national unemployment rate shot up to 7.6 percent, according to a Labor Department report on Friday that underlined a deepening recession.

January's job losses were worse than the 525,000 that had been forecast by Wall Street economists, who also had expected the unemployment rate to come in lower at 7.5 percent. The bleak employment data is certain to be cited by the Obama administration as a fresh reason for Congress to speed up debate over a multibillion-dollar package of proposals to try to stimulate economic activity.

The True State of Employment

Jobless rate

The other day I heard George Will pontificate that the unemployment rate of 8% is better than the 10% unemployment this nation faced during the recession of the early 80's. Yes it's true that today the United States is approaching an official uneployment rate of 8%, but we are not using the same methodology to determine the unemployment rate that was used in 1980. The methedology has been changed by both Reagan and Clinton. If the methodology used in 1980, before the Reagan Administration first changed it to hide the depth of that era's deep recession, were applied, it would be 17% today, or one in seven workers

Even still the number of jobless American workers receiving unemployment checks rose to the highest level since the government began keeping records in 1967. The Labor Department is reporting that the number of Americans drawing jobless benefits for a week or longer rose to 4,776,000 in the week ended Jan. 17, the latest data available.

This number eclipses the prior mark set in November 1982, when 4,713,000 million Americans drew benefits.

Americans who moved to collect their first unemployment checks rose for the third consecutive week, to 588,000, according to a government report released Thursday. The number of Americans filing for unemployment claims has surged by 61% from this time a year ago. The AP notes that the results “were worse than analysts expected.”

Fed Says Recession Started Last Spring

Remember last spring when the Bush administration and Fox news kept saying that the nation was not in a Recession, and that it was all symantics, and the fundementals of the economy were strong. Guess those of us who actually were paying attention were right. It now turns out that the U.S. economy did fall into a recession last spring. And the expectation is that the U.S. economy will contract sharply this quarter as more than 200,000 workers per month are added to the rolls of the unemployed.

The Philadelphia Federal Reserve's latest Survey of Professional Forecasters removed any doubt with the survey that was released today. I have been amazed that there are some people who still want to deny that this nation is in a recession, even as corporate spending has collapsed.

The Philadelphia Fed's survey said the U.S. economy entered a recession in April and that it will last 14 months. It predicted gross domestic product would shrink by 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter, a sharp downgrade from the previous prediction of 0.7 percent growth.

The survey predicted the economy would shed an average of 222,400 jobs per month this quarter, versus the previous forecast of a loss of 45,400 per month. The survey said first-quarter GDP would decline by 1.1 pct and the unemployment rate would hit 7.0 percent during the first three months of next year.

Unemployment rate up to 6.5%

CNN is reporting this morning that job losses in October were much "worse than expected."

A U.S. government report released this morning that U.S. employers cut payrolls by 240,000 jobs in October. This is much more severe than was expected, and expectations were bad starting out. The government report also showed that September registered the biggest monthly loss in jobs in nearly seven years. The government report showed that the U.S. labor markets are sharply deteriorating.

The Labor Department reported that the national unemployment rate shot up to 6.5 percent from 6.1 percent in September, the highest since March 1994. CNN is reporting that total lost jobs is 1,179,000 for this year.

The good thing is that Barack Obama recognizes that there is no time to wait on the financial crisis and the economy. He is going to be meeting with his economic advisers today, with the idea of developing a strategy. Obama and vice-president-elect Joe Biden are going to meet with 17 members of their transition economic advisory board, which includes investor Warren Buffet, former cabinet officials such as Paul Volker, and executives from Xerox Corp., Time Warner Inc., Google Inc. and the Hyatt hotel company.

Today's meeting will be followed by Barack Obama's first news conference as president-elect, scheduled for 2:30 pm ET. There is some expectation that Barack Obama could announce some key economic cabinet positions for his administration at today's news conference. Rumoured to be among those being considered for the post of treasury secretary are Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers; former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and Laura Tyson, chair of Bill Clinton's council of economic advisers.