This Week in Apocalypse
R. sends along "Shares Swoon on Dim Earnings Forecast":
A report from Automatic Data Processing, a payroll processing company, raised new concerns about unemployment, showing that private employers had cut 693,000 jobs as the recession deepened in December, far more than economists expectations of 495,000 job losses. The report stoked fears that unemployment numbers for December, scheduled to be released on Friday, could be far worse than economists were expecting.
The United States lost a total of 1.9 million jobs for last year through November as the crises in financial and credit markets helped send the weakening economy into a sharp decline. Unemployment rose to 6.7 percent in November, and economists said it could reach 7 percent in December.
Not to worry: R. also sends along "Food Foraging Lessons for the Recession".
As I've told some others, my best guess (based largely on research I did (didn't-stop-doing) for Amaranth) is that the bubble is going to pop sometime between early summer and early fall of '09, and these days, I'm seeing more and more people echo that forecast. If you want to read something a bit sensational about the mid-'09 collapse, to get your day rolling with a bit of anxiety, have a look at this.
But what do I know? I'm a trained literary scholar, not an economist. Everything may work out just fine. But what if it doesn't?
What would you do?
Originally published at Darin Bradley.