Interesting Facts from Today's Employment Report

some other interesting facts: http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/01/employment-summary-part-time-workers.html this has been the slowest employment recovery since ww2. there is no other recession that had not fully recovered by this time and only one whose deepest employment drop was lower than our current level (and that was 1948). unemployed for over 26 weeks remains at an extraordinarily high level as well. one really interesting takeawy from the wonderful first chart showing job losses centered around the peak drop: almost all the other recessions look the same save the last 3 which have had increasing durations for recovery. one might be led to ask what they had in common that others did not. i would posit that the answer is "alan greenspan" a fed chair who will go down in history as the idiot who undid volcker's good work. his "loose money at every dip" "greenspan put" policies build up more and more debt and leverage until we got this mess. he turned the bubble of 2000 which was an easy one to recover from (equity funded, productive resources) into this one, a debt bubble in non productive resources, which will take a decade. his failure to really believe in bubbles drove us off a cliff and had left his disciple, helicopter ben, inflating and even more pernicious bubble (in federal debt) while not even digging us out of the last one. for all those who seem to feel that just printing enough money can cure recession and promote real growth, i'd recommend taking a really hard look at this track record. i think you'll find that the opposite has been the case and that while loose money can have (for a time) some short term effects, it ultimately just builds up greater and greater imbalances, like using amphetamines to cure a hangover.