In addition to today's broad economic disappointment that once again nobody could have foreseen (save for a few comments from us back in January predicting just this most recent contraction), another incrementally negative development which will force the spin doctor to earn their overtime is the observation that over the past year at least 1 million unemployed have now officially fallen off the 99-week gravy train, and exhausted their entire jobless benefits. Luckily, for 10% of the US population there is the magically levitating S&P. For everyone else, there are foodstamps (for now).. and of course the worthless dollar. And in other news, Peter Tchir looks at the recent deplorable jobless claims numbers (wonder why you aren't hearing much about today's initial claims on CNBC? that's why) and comes to the following logical conclusion: "Currently expectations for next Friday's NFP is 183k. I think the number will be 160k, but in this world it makes no difference since that will encourage belief in QE3 which will trigger dollar weakness which will cause stocks to go up. Since its hard to go long stocks with this logic, it leaves me looking at precious metals." Tchir is not the only one doing so.

But first, the WSJ explains why quietly one million have fallen off Uncle Sam's weekly pittance:

Roughly one million people were unable to find work after exhausting their unemployment benefits over the past year, new data released Thursday by the Labor Department suggests.



The back-of-the-envelope datapoint is yet another sign that the labor market remains weak, economists said.



About 8.2 million idled workers were receiving unemployment benefits as of the week ended April 9, the Labor Department said in its weekly jobless claims report. That compares to about 10.5 million individuals at the same time last year, a decline of roughly 2.3 million people.



Since the federal government estimates that the economy created 1.3 million jobs during the 12 months ended in March, economists said that slightly less people probably fell through the cracks and couldn’t find employment.



“That leaves, roughly speaking, about one million people who have exhausted their unemployment benefits and have very likely not yet found a job,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at MFR Inc. in New York.

However, as long as all these recently subsidy-free individuals have a mortgage which they are not paying, and which the banks are not enforcing payment on as that would accelerate mark to market in an insolvent world, we are not too worried about their prospects, for now.

We will be worried soon, when all the broken wheels supporting the zombi economy finally fall off (and god help us if Bernanke really does not do QE3).

From Peter Tchir: