[This is the newest installment in an ongoing news series that looks at the anticipated “aftershocks” of the global financial crisis, and the profit plays those events can trigger.]
By Jason SimpkinsAnd William Patalon IIIMoney Morning Editors
U.S. consumers are already losing their jobs at an accelerating rate.
The same thing is now set to happen to their credit lines.
But with so many Americans already losing their main source of income – their jobs – at an ever-spiraling rate, will an economy that derives two-thirds of its power from consumer spending end up mired in its worst funk in decades because those same consumers are now losing their charge accounts?
Before you dismiss the possibility, consider this: The U.S. economy weakened across all regions since the middle of October as it became tougher to get loans and demand for credit shrank, the U.S. Federal Reserve said in its regional economic survey report yesterday (Wednesday). The so-called “Beige Book” report – published just two weeks before central bank policymakers are to meet and consider interest-rate changes – said that retail sales, tourism spending and manufacturing declined in most places, labeled housing markets as “weak” and concluded that the commercial real estate sector “weakened broadly,” Bloomberg News reported.
“We are looking at an economy that is not only in a recession, but a recession that is deepening rapidly,” former Fed Governor Lyle Gramley, now senior economic adviser at Stanford Group Co., told Bloomberg Television. “It certainly is a gloomy report, but not, I guess, worse than what you would expect given the data [we’ve seen] coming in.”
The United States has already been in a recession for a year, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) reported this week. This economic one-two punch could generate a much-bigger financial crisis “aftershock” than many experts realize. Only two of the last 10 recessions to take place since the Great Depression have lasted a full year. But this one could last well into 2010. To fully understand the forces at play, let’s first look at the outlook for U.S. employment.
Weakening Worker Ranks
Non-farm payroll employment fell by 240,000 in October, and the unemployment rate jumped to 6.5%, up from 6.1% the month before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in early November. October’s drop in payroll employment followed declines of 127,000 in August and 284,000 in September.
That means that U.S. employment has fallen by 1.2 million jobs in the first 10 months of the year, with more than half of that decrease occurring in August, September and October.
The government’s jobless numbers for November won’t be released until tomorrow (Friday) – although it’s expected to show that the U.S. economy lost jobs for the 11th straight month, Bloomberg News reported.
But a private report based on payroll data released Tuesday said that United States companies eliminated an estimated 250,000 jobs in November – a much larger amount than was forecast and the most since November 2001, said ADP Employer Services, a unit of payroll-processor Automatic Data Processing Inc. (ADP). That would take the [...]
Posted in 
Tags: 
