The Recovery ist Kaput

Well, I guess that answers my question:

The unemployment figures for December will be released this friday, I believe. Will those figures show an increase in the ranks of the nearly 15.5 million unemployed?

The answer is: yes. My question here is this: If there are 8 million unemployed, and that equals 10 percent, then 1 percent would be 800,000 and .1 percent would be 80,000. Since 85,000 jobs were lost, the unemployment rate should have risen by .1 percent. It didn't. More spin?

Bankruptcy filings for Central Florida are still up. For the month of December 2009, there were 4,951 bankruptcy filings. That figure is up from November's 4,927.

The numbers for the year are even worse:
2009 61,690
2008 42,557
2007 26,424
2006 15,304

I am not sure if these numbers are representative of what is going on in the rest of the country, but I would imagine that they are. We are posting bankruptcy rates that are 4 times higher than what they were in 2006.

Every bankruptcy filing represents lenders and businesses that are not going to get paid at least a portion of the money that they thought they would. Until the unemployment and bankruptcy numbers start to fall, it is too premature to even think about a recovery.