Just to add some alarmism concerning that Truman quote:
http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/06/news.../jobs_january/
Quote:
Employers slashed another 598,000 jobs off of U.S. payrolls in January, taking the unemployment rate up to 7.6%, according to the latest government reading on the nation's battered labor market.
The latest job loss is the worst since December 1974, and brings job losses to 1.8 million in just the last three months, or half of the 3.6 million jobs that have been lost since the beginning of 2008.
The loss since November is the biggest 3-month drop since immediately after the end of World War II, when the defense industry was shutting down for conversion to civilian production.
January's job loss was also worse than the forecast of a loss of 540,000 jobs from economists surveyed by Briefing.com
The rise in the unemployment rate also was worse than the 7.5% rate economists expected. The unemployment rate is now at its highest level since September, 1992.
As bad as the unemployment rate was, it only tells part of the story for people struggling to find jobs. Friday's report also showed that 2.6 million people have now been out of work for more than six months, the most long-term unemployed since 1983.
And that number only counts those still looking for work. The so-called underemployment rate, which includes those who have stopped looking for work and people working only part-time that want full-time positions, climbed to 13.9% from 13.5% in December. That is the highest rate for this measure since the Labor Department first started tracking it in 1994.
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I think there is a reason why they already call it the worst economic crisis since the great fall in the 1920s. And quite some officials point out that it already is worse.
However, it will become worse this year. AIG just illustrated that end of good news is not in sight: with 100 billion lost, they just marked the highest loss of a single company in the history of economic recordings.
What is worrying is that more and more of the real system key nodes reveal how deep they are in trouble, like AIG in America or HRE in Germany. If any of these key players falls, they pull a whole rat tail of others down with them. HRE in Germany falling, for example, would mean the total collapse of Germany's national infrastructure construction and the breakdown of all national services associated with that.
Once we see such key players falling, the real fun begins. Compared to that, GM and Lehmann are just funny entertainment for the interruption in the main program.
If anything is to be learned form current times, then how deeply sick and unhealthy the economic structures are that have been risen in the past. There is little reason to be proud of them or sell them as a success story. More realistic assessment obviously would be to call them rightout dumb and stupid.