I wrote a piece on Keystone Politics about today’s abysmal jobs report and what it means for our economy. It’s national in scope, despite being on KP.

Today’s jobs report brings the grim news that the economy only added 18,000 jobs in June. Just to keep up with general population growth, we need to create 150,000 jobs a month, meaning that anything less than that number means we’re actually losing jobs.

So today’s job report actually means that 132,000 people lost their jobs in June. Many of these jobs were teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other government workers we can no longer afford due to government shortfalls. Yet most economists say we’re not in a recession anymore. If this isn’t a recession, I’ll eat my hat.

This will be old news to insiders, but someone was just telling me about Bauer Financial’s bank star ratings; they give a instant look at the health of local and regional banks. Take a look at Georgia (lots of bad banks) versus New York (relatively few bad banks). (no permalinks to those pages, so use the link above)

Why is this important? It might give you a bit of a sneak peak into banks that could soon be on the FDIC’s Friday closures list. So as not to cause bank runs, the FDIC announces bank takeovers around 5:30 on Friday. (“No advance notice is given to the public on bank closures.” -FDIC) Take a look at the full list – a handful every year from 2000-2007, and now 2-4 per week. Massive.

Loving the acronymization of the TARP bailout. Krugman suggested TANF 2 (a play on the TANF personal welfare assistance program), but Jamie Galbraith trumps everyone:

BARF – Bad Assets Relief Fund.

This makes sense, although I think it’s written in an unproductively harsh way at some points:

American consumers are awash in debt, drowning in it. This is the
fundamental issue with the stimulus proposal. We’re trying to borrow
our way out of debt. Unfortunately, we need a recession. That is,
consumption must decline because for some time we have been consuming
more than we produce or have reasonable prospects of producing.
Monetary policy has been used to inflate a series of bubbles to avoid
the consequences of excess debt, and the more we try to hold it off,
the worse it’s going to be. Bourbon works as a hangover cure, but only
for a while.

It’s theoretically possible for an
intelligently-designed stimulus action to help smooth this landing a
bit, but we can’t avoid a painful adjustment. Americans are going to
live in smaller houses, drive older cars, vacation nearer to home and
have less impressive digital camcorders than they expect.