Some cheery economic data…The world economy is tracking or doing worse than during the Great Depression (September 2009 update) | vox – Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists.
Don’t you just love capitalism? And Glenn Dyer over @ Crikey describes the US situation as a social powderkeg:
Yes, Friday night’s employment figures were better than expected: just 216,000 jobs went last month and the unemployment rate rose to 9.7% because more people went looking for work, a sign of increasing confidence among the unemployed.
And yet that’s a bit of a mirage because it hides the continuing pain and agony across thousands of American cities and towns.
As well five more American banks failed on Friday night in another few hours of financial bloodletting in the US heartland: all were small and 89 have now collapsed so far this year. That’s another part of the picture with job losses in some towns and cities and rising bad debts starting to impact on financial institutions.
The economic slowdown may be reversing itself (American economists are talking about growth of 3-4% annual for the rest of this year, and surging corporate profits, but millions of Americans are being left behind having lost their houses, their jobs, having hours and pay cut and worse, more than 34 million are on some sort of government food aid, so desperate are their circumstances.
