Are you unemployed? Well for many of you if you are not you will be. Yesteday I learned that my family is expecting to see a rash of unemployed siblings all with college degrees, advanced careers, houses, dogs, children, cars, et cetera.

Since December 2007 I have kept track on my own computer the job loss and now I think this illustrates the obvious what Roubini, Johnson, Krugman are all saying---this is a depression brewing. Job loss progression:

• December 2007 = <19,000>
  
• January-February-March 2008 (1Q '08)  = <232,000> av bleed 77,333 monthly
• April-May-June '08 (2Q) = <206,000> av bleed 68,666 ('08 av  73,000 mo.) <457,000 t>
  
• July '08 = <60,000>
• Aug '08 = <127,000>
• Sept '08 = <284,000> (3Q '08) = <471,000> (av bleed 157,000) <928,000 ttl>
  
• Oct'08 = <423,000>
  
• Nov '08 = <584,000>
• Dec '08 = <681,000> (4Q '08) <1,688,000>(av bleed 562,666)<2,644,000 ttl>
• Jan '09 = <655,000>
• Feb '09 = <706,000>
• Mar '09 = <742,000> (1Q '09) <2,103,000> (av bl 701,000) <4,719,000 ttl)

If you understand progression analysis the first 2 quarters the recession was garden variety and manageable, but then the dike began to break in August cascading to a level that the monthly bleed basically doubled the bleed of the first two quarters, where in October we lost almost as many jobs as we did in the first 6 months, where in the 4th quarter we lost 1 1/2 times more than lost in first 3 quarters. Now the bleed continues to grow where the first quarter of 2009 is almost 40% of the 4th quarter, though like a flood it is slowly leveling off.

At this rate the 2nd quarter will probably see April reach 800,000 job loss, where then one can ably project that May might see us hitting 840,000, June growing to 880,000 or eclipsing 2,500,000 amassing 4.6M for 2009 already and therefore passing 7M for the entire crisis.

The reality is that the job loss will continue at some rate, and if Roubini and Johnson are correct that we have to nationalize the banks and break up the financial elite the job loss will probably regress at a level that it reached like the inverse of the bell curve. So rosy let us presume that job loss of another 2M in the last two quarters so we could be between 9-10M job loss by Christmas 2009. Happy Holiday everyone!

The earlier recession of 2001 the best year in hiring was 2004 where 2.1M jobs were added. At that rate it would take five years just to catch up the job loss if it stopped in Dec 2009. But that is not reality. Now this does not include the necessary 150,000 jobs needed to include increased population growth. This equates to another 3.6M jobs or a deficit of 13M jobs and a hiring rate of 2.1M takes us into six years of recovery where another 9M jobs have to be created during that time to also incorporate the population growth. All told that is 22M over this period that have to be created to simply come back to zero. Now remember Bush Administration was 7M  in the deficit creating jobs to incorporate population growth in his 8 years.

I just thought you all should know these macro numbers. My actual fear is that the jobloss will not end until sometime in 2010.  So it is a Depression. And that is only the US.