"There has been so much bad economic news out, recently, I do not see how anyone with half a frontal lobe could say the economy is not in trouble. Friday, new unemployment figures were announced, and a weak 119,000 jobs were created. The rate fell to 8.1%, but only because more discouraged workers stopped looking for work and disappeared from the government’s data base. In Friday’s report, economist John Williams of Shadowstats.com summed it all up by saying, “The headline U.3 unemployment rate dropped a statistically insignificant notch to 8.1% in April, from 8.2% in March, but the “good” news was anything but good. The declining pace of headline unemployment reflected an accelerating increase in the number of the headline unemployed giving up looking for work, because there were no jobs to be had. . . . The SGS-Alternate Unemployment Measure, accordingly, notched higher in April to 22.3%, from 22.2% in March.”
So, unemployment in the real world actually went up—not down. According to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, planned job cuts rose 7.1% in April, and more than 40,000 more workers are going to be laid off."
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