So this morning’s job report was better than expected, with the economy adding 117,000 jobs. So that’s good, right? Well, not really. More like mediocre. Among other things, we get to write off people who are so discouraged they just stopped looking, meaning there were actually less people working in July than in June. So that’s the mediocre.
The Bad is the downgrading of the country’s credit rating, courtesy of S&P. As a coworker of mine noted last week, when this was only a possibility, “If you’ve seen the movie Inside Job you’d kind of have to take any rating coming out of S&P with a grain of salt – okay maybe a truckload of salt – becuase how did those people put it when they were in the Congressional hearings? They said something like ‘It’s not like those ratings mean anything, it’s more like’…what’s the word I’m looking for here?”
“You mean ‘It’s more like they’re guidelines?'” I asked”
“Exactly!” she said. “Like Pirates of the Caribbean, which is fitting, since they are real, live 21st Century Pirates.”
Sadly for the state of the national and global economy, most people have not, in fact, seen Inside Job so they still treat the pronouncements of entities like S&P with some degree of credulity.
If you want to know all the nuanced reasons why the mainstream media thinks they downgraded us after President Capitulator capitulated in the nick of time, and the Tea Party released the economy during the recent Debt Ceiling Hostage Crisis, you can go read this I suppose. I haven’t bothered, since anyone with a grain of sense saw this coming when the Debt Ceiling Hostage Crisis was still ongoing. (Hint for confused Tea Partiers: your guys may have released the hostage, but they didn’t release the hostage unharmed). So that’s the bad.
So where’s the Ugly?
I expect we’ll be treated to that on Monday morning when the markets open.
Many thanks again to prominent Illinois Economic Terrorists Randy Hultgren and Joe Walsh, for saddlling me, my children, my grandchildren, yea unto who only knows how many generations, with that much more debt, because even if the entire global economy doesn’t crash promptly on Monday morning, the higher interest rates we will now be charged, thanks to your diligent efforts to fuck up the entire world, will ensure our national debt increases exponentially.
Tags: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Debt Ceiling Hostage Crisis, depression, Double Dip Recession, economy, Great Recession, Idiots, Illinois Economic Terrorists, Inside Job, Joe Walsh, Pirates of the Carribean, Randy Hultgren, recession, S&P, stock market, Tea Party