it's raining pink slips

the ADP employer services survey reports today that 693,000 people were laid off during the month of december. the number has yet to be confirmed by sources at the fed, whose own estimate of the damage will be made available on friday. besides being the single largest job slashing since 1975 (don't you love these little retrospectives? time is somehow supposed to make you feel worse about the numbers), it's also one that's primarily hit small- and medium-size employers. only 91,000, or 15%, of firings were carried out by large firms. as the financial times points out, we're watching trickle down economics at its finest: the fuck-ups of the big guys have started to come crashing down on the little ones. december is usually a big shopping season, one at which most small retail businesses make their money for the year; it isn't surprising that with the sharp contraction in christmas spending there follows a similarly sharp contraction in employment. as one mr. sheperdson, chief US economist at something called high frequeny economics, put it, "this is shockingly awful."

as an aside, employment figures have also been released in germany, which show 18,000 fewer 'participants' in the labor market over the previous month. now, i can't help but notice a strong bias in the reporting on germany and america. while germany's labor market has expanded swiftly over the past 34 months, bringing unemployment down from an all-time high of 11% to 7.5% in november, an uptick of 0.1%, which these latest figures suggest, is not a particularly large blow. yet we have a full paragraph in the ft's germany coverage devoted to "the surprising severity and swiftness of the economic downturn in germany," as well as a rather rosy forecast, in another article, that "the US will come out of this predicament first." i don't know if any of these people have been paying attention to what's going on, but do these numbers mean nothing to them? obama predicts a $1 trillion deficit next year and for years afterwards; bernanke is considering price controls on t-bills; and pending home sales, which track orders for new homes, have fallen 5.3% year-on-year, with "no evidence that, as weak as it is, housing activity is close to bottom." the only bright news is that construction spending has gone up, and that only because of public works, and yet the fed predicts that the economy will recover in the third quarter and the recession will be over. i am not a highly experienced macroeconomist, so take what i say with a grain salt, but, you know, what the fuck? every single economic forecast that has been made since the mortgage crisis started in '07 has been either entirely wrong or understated by a minimum of 30%. unemployment continues to beat expectations every month. some people even believe that what the government tells us on friday will be worse than the news from the ADP. do these guys see something going on that i don't? if so, please, bernanke and posse, don't hold out on us.