I wrote about the latest jobs numbers this morning in Jobs Contract 11th Straight Month; Unemployment Rate Hits 6.7%.



Let's look at some more details starting with this report: Half-million jobs vanish as economy deteriorates.



An alarming half-million American jobs vanished virtually in a flash last month, the worst mass layoffs in over a third of a century, as economic carnage spread ever faster and the nation hurtled toward what could be the hardest hard times since the Great Depression.



Staring at 533,000 lost jobs, economists were anything but hopeful. Since the start of the recession last December, the economy has shed 1.9 million jobs, and the number of unemployed people has increased by 2.7 million -- to 10.3 million now out of work.



Some analysts predict 3 million more jobs will be lost between now and the spring of 2010 -- and that the once-humming U.S. economy could stagger backward at a shocking 6 percent rate for the current three-month quarter.



The jobless rate would have bolted to 7 percent for the month if not for the exodus of 422,000 people from the work force for any number of reasons -- going back to school, retiring or simply abandoning job searches out of sheer frustration. When people stop looking, they're no longer counted in the unemployment rate.



The United States -- already in recession for a year, may not be out of it until the spring of 2010 -- making for the longest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, economists are now saying. Recessions in the mid-1970s and early 1980s last 16 months.



Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent in 1982, terrible but still a far cry from the Depression, when roughly one in four Americans were out of work.

Depressionomics

Deflation has already set in and it's now realistic to start talking about another "D" word, this one being depression. Before we can use a word, we must define it. For the sake of argument, let's define depression as unemployment of 10% or greater.

Now that the "R" word is officially out of the closet, can the "D" word be far behind?



The National Bureau of Economic Research, the august body that serves as a thermometer for the U.S. economy, confirmed Monday what many already suspected: We're in a recession and have been for a year.



But as the economic crisis has deepened this fall, analysts and business executives increasingly have raised the prospect that we're headed for a depression. The most recent example came Wednesday, when a top Chrysler executive told Congress that the failure of a major U.S. automaker could "trigger a depression."



If so, don't expect the National Bureau of Economic Research to give us a head's up when it happens.



"It's just not a part of the business-cycle-dating process that the NBER has been involved in," a spokeswoman for the bureau said.



According to the bureau's website, "The NBER does not separately identify depressions. The NBER business cycle chronology identifies the dates of peaks and troughs in economic activity. We refer to the period between a peak and a trough as a contraction or a recession, and the period between the trough and the peak as an expansion."

Table A-12

Other Factors

Unprecedented numbers of foreclosures and bankruptcies.

Home prices have declined the most in history.

The S&P 500 was down 49% at one point this year. That exceeded any yearly loss during the great depression.