WTO Director General Pascal Lamy, told Reuters Television:

That’s the situation and I’m afraid I can’t read any good news in my trade numbers.

This news doesn’t bode well for any type of recovery. “Jobs picture turns gloomier” say the headlines. The U.S. unemployment rate officially popped up to 9.5% as nonfarm payrolls shed 467,000 jobs in June. The market is tanking today on this “brown shoot”… But the real story is far worse. And as reality seeps into the empty head of Joe Investor it could spell the end for the post-2008 wipe-out sucker’s rally…

As James Davidson points out in Crisis Strategy Alert, the BLS numbers have been massaged, manipulated, and contorted into giving only half the story. He says,

To get a real picture of the current unemployment levels you need to focus on the grossly underreported U-6 data set known as “alternative measures of labor utilization.” The U-6 data set includes everyone counted in U-3, plus “all marginally attached workers” and people who aren’t working full-time but wish they were (i.e., the underemployed). (Marginally employed covers “persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past.)

When you add up U-3 and all the underutilized workers, the official U-6 rate for May 2009 is 16.4%. In other words, the employment picture is twice as bad 14 months after the recent peak as it was in December 1930, 18 months after the peak prior to the Great Depression.

But this surge in people lining up for welfare isn’t limited to the US either. According to the BBC, unemployment in the eurozone also jumped to 9.5%.  Leading the charge is Spain with 18.7% unemployment, while the liberal Dutch are experiencing a mere 3.2%.  Martin van Vliet an economist at ING on the new numbers:

May’s sharp increase in eurozone unemployment demonstrates that the ‘green shoots of recovery’ are not yet showing up in the labour market.

Ireland looks like the next eurozone nation to bite the dust. Our Irish editor, Chris Hunter, is taking holiday in Dublin right now.  In an ode to his arrival, Moody’s slashed Ireland’s debt rating from AAA to AA1.  Dietmar Hornung of Moody’s Sovereign Risk Group had this to say in news release:

The pronounced weakness in the economic activity has been translating into a severe deterioration of Ireland’s public finances, and the country is set to emerge from the current economic crisis with a considerably higher debt burden for the foreseeable future.

Moody’s is the last large agency to cut Ireland’s credit rating.  Fitch and Standard & Poors cut it earlier this year citing soaring public debt and a negative economic outlook.  As Irish GDP continues to contract, we expect further cuts in Ireland’s bleak future.

Yes dear reader the next leg down in this Greater Depression is not far off. The textbook sucker’s rally is losing steam. Take profits and buckle up because the second half of this year could test the March lows. If that were to happen, or even anything close it would be devastating to investor sentiment. Most “investors” have never seen a prolonged bear market, they wouldn’t recognize it or know what to do.  But one thing they will do is flee to cash.

In the short-term, we here are Notes are bullish on the dollar for this reason. Long-term of course we think the buck is doomed. But woe to those who go against the dollar too early. We think that James Davidson is doing all the right things to capture short-term dollar strength while hedging against long-term weakness with the Crisis Strategy Alert portfolio, click here to learn more about what he’s doing…

There is more New Bad News (NBN) contained in November’s drop in payroll employment because, “Job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors in November.”

The New Bad News (NBN) to me personally is that this means that if I get fired again, then another job will be that much harder to find, especially since my job skills are apparently substandard, as I father from my current boss being sure that she can train a monkey to do my job and, as she said, “It will probably have better personal hygiene, too!”

Since experience has shown that I am not a “people person”, service industry jobs are especially difficult for me, and there always comes a time when I finally snap and I say, in a voice that gets louder and louder until I am shrieking, “I’m not going to ask if you want fries with that! You shouldn’t have any fries, because you are another big fat pig who spent all your money on fatty foods and sugared drinks instead of putting some money into gold and silver to protect yourself from the debasement of the purchasing power of the money thanks to the Federal Reserve creating so damned much money and credit to fuel doomed booms and a cancerous growth of government! And yet you want to talk to me about how you want some stupid fried potatoes, you moron? Hahahaha!”

Anyway, the report does not actually mention me by name or even wish me good luck in getting another job, but farther down in the report we find that “Total Unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers”, zoomed to 12.5%! It’s worse than I thought!

Personally, I am not sure how to interpret this exactly, but I know two things. For one, unemployment figures have never been this bad, as far as I know without doing any research of any kind; and secondly, the laughable CES Birth-Death Model figured that, perhaps by magic, 30,000 new jobs were created in November! Hahaha!

Part of the explanation could be that, as John Crudele of the NY Post explains, “Right now, the unemployment rate would be more than twice as bad if you go back to the way this figure used to be calculated” back in 1994 when “the Clinton White House decided that the unemployment rate needed to be modernized.”

And one of the things they did was decide that from now on, “anyone who had been out of work for at least a year was no longer counted as unemployed – they were just too lazy and discouraged to find work”! Hahaha!

Oddly enough, there is no statistical offset for people like me, who are the nation’s over-employed, which is to say we are chronically lazy, worthless and undependable louts who SHOULD be unemployed, but who actually have jobs!

The news media is happily parroting the official government pronouncements and those of its minions while ignoring my tragic story of love lost, and so they all join together to report that unemployment is 6.7%, while just up the street, the McKinsey Global Institute says that it estimates that the unemployment rate in the United States is actually 16.25%, and here’s John Williams at shadowstats.com putting it at 16.5%!

So it looks like a lot of people are getting fired, but on the other hand, government payrolls went up again, for the zillionth month in a row, this time by another 7,000 workers, bringing the total to a staggering 22.5 million government workers out of a total 144.2 million official jobs in the whole freaking country, which of course does not count the number of new prostitutes and professional thieves that have sprung up in response to financial devastation. So maybe the 30,000 new jobs assumed in the CES Birth-Death Model in actually pretty close! Hahaha!

Welcome to the hell of inflation!

Source: No Rest for the Unemployed

The consensus on Wall Street is for nonfarm payrolls in March to fall by roughly 60,000 jobs. This will raise the unemployment rate from 4.8% to 5%.

Already, the private sector has shed jobs for four consecutive months, led by losses in manufacturing and construction.

Despite expected bad news on the jobs front, US stock futures are pointing higher this morning following a surge in European stocks rose, which are set for the biggest weekly gain in a year, according to Bloomberg.

“What we’re seeing is a highly volatile stock market,” says Money Morning’s Jennifer Yousfi.

“One of the best protections for an investment portfolio during times of volatility is diversification. And while one way to diversify a portfolio is to buy several different stocks in various industries, it’s possible to get diversification with just one pick – if you make it a smart one.”

“If you want to bet on something, bet on deleveraging,” says Bill Bonner in The Daily Reckoning.

“This is where inflation and deflation make common cause. They both deleverage the world…reducing the value of debt – either by defaults or by lowering the real value of the debt itself. That is the real story in the financial markets…and in the housing market: leverage is being marked down. A residential mortgage worth $200,000 two years ago may be worth only $150,000 now, for example. Bear Stearns – worth billions a few months ago – is now worth peanuts.”