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.”
