johan's Journal

...my prediction of the magic number from the US BLS April unemployment report was high; turns out it went up another 0.4% again rather than 0.6%. Of course this is still bad news, despite the fact that most of the mainstream media seemed to be spinning it as "the rate of job loss may be slowing." Unemployment is still quite bad, though. If the unemployment rate increases at 0.3% for each of the remaining nine months of 2009, it will be 11.6% by January of 2010, which would be gruesome.

I think the last few months of 2009 year will be really telling. Though i'm starting to wonder that when the U.S. economy does start to improve, it may take another hit as the safe-haven investors* start to pull their money out of U.S. Treasury bills, and other U.S. investments, and put it back overseas, in Euros or developing economies. And then there's the inflationary effect of the U.S. Treasury printing all this money, which will become all too real should the U.S. economy start to recover. Not that the U.S. economy could be considered to be recovering yet, by any stretch of the imagination.

So still plenty of prospects for Doom, at least from the perspective in my strange little corner of "reality."

*This isn't that weird of an idea, mainstream media has been attributing the sunrising increase in the U.S. dollar's value to safe-haven investors for some time.