Catherine Rampell at Economix has updated this miserable chart, showing job losses in this recession compared to recent ones (expressed as a percentage of peak employment).

The dark blue line that just keeps heading down represents current recession. Since the official start of the recession in December 2007, the economy has had a net loss of about 5.2 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs.

The horizontal axis measures the number of months since the recession started. The vertical axis measures the share of pre-recession jobs that still exist.

As you can see, the current downturn started out similar to the 2001-05 and 1990-3 recessions, with job losses far less violent than those of the eighties and seventies. But around nine months in, things got ugly and kept getting uglier.