In today's increasingly digital world, analysts spend a lot of time focusing on measurable details. They ask questions like "How long?" "How big?" and "How many?" and seek to draw all sorts of conclusions from the answers.

But as we've often seen during the past two years, hard data doesn't necessarily tell the whole story. In fact, one reason why so many Wall Street "strategists" and economists missed the boat on the unfolding depression is because they gave short shrift to anecdotal reports and other evidence of widespread economic distress that could not be easily distilled into simple data points.

That doesn't mean numbers don't matter, of course. As it happens, a report by the associate editor of TomDispatch.com, embedded within a post entitled Tomgram: Nick Turse, Desperate Times and Desperate Measures," marries hard and soft data together in a way that makes it clear just how bad things are.

The headlines tell the story. My hometown paper played the news relatively mildly as "Layoffs Spread to More Sectors of the Economy"; the Washington Post chose the slightly stronger, "Layoffs Cut Deeper into Economy"; the Los Angeles Times picked "Deluge of Layoffs Hits U.S. Economy"; the Indianapolis Star, "50,000 New Pink Slips Pile Up"; and the San Jose Mercury, "Bloody Monday: U.S. firms slash 50,000 jobs." At a news conference, the new president rattled off selected names from the all-star line-up of companies that were tossing out bodies and shutting down lives: "Over the last few days we've learned that Microsoft, Intel, United Airlines, Home Depot, Sprint Nextel, and Caterpillar are each cutting thousands of jobs. These are not just numbers on a page. As with the millions of jobs lost in 2008, these are working men and women whose families have been disrupted and whose dreams have been put on hold."

Meanwhile, the one-day estimate of the number of layoffs, depending on how you were counting and whether you were speaking nationally or globally, rattled around the world -- more than 40,000, 50,000, 55,000, more than 60,000, 71,400, 76,000. Whatever way you cut it, these were staggering tallies that, as Econowhiner wrote in her blog, gave the phrase "Bloody Monday" new meaning in our world.

Add in the possibility that the flood of foreclosures might possibly be even larger than imagined and, as Nick Turse indicates in his latest post, "bloody" is no longer just a metaphor. Increasingly, the "bloody" layoffs and "bloody" foreclosures lead to "bloody" facts on the American ground. This is a crucial story that Turse first began covering back in October in a piece, "The Rising Body Count on Main Street," that explored local press reports nationwide about extreme acts by economically distressed and desperate Americans. Like his "Fallen Legion" series of the Bush era -- an invaluable record of those government insiders who "fell" while fighting to hold the line against the administration from hell -- this is a subject TomDispatch expects to return to regularly. After all, as "Bloody Monday" makes all too clear, the bloody count of extreme acts in America is likely to rise for a long, long time to come. Tom

Meltdown Madness

The Human Costs of the Economic Crisis
By Nick Turse

The body count is still rising. For months on end, marked by bankruptcies, foreclosures, evictions, and layoffs, the economic meltdown has taken a heavy toll on Americans. In response, a range of extreme acts including suicide, self-inflicted injury, murder, and arson have hit the local news. By October 2008, an analysis of press reports nationwide indicated that an epidemic of tragedies spurred by the financial crisis had already spread from Pasadena, California, to Taunton, Massachusetts, from Roseville, Minnesota, to Ocala, Florida.

In the three months since, the pain has been migrating upwards. A growing number of the world's rich have garnered headlines for high profile, financially-motivated suicides. Take the New Zealand-born "millionaire financier" who leapt in front of an express train in Great Britain or the "German tycoon" who did much the same in his homeland. These have, with increasing regularity, hit front pages around the world. An example would be New York-based money manager René-Thierry Magnon de la Villehuchet, who slashed his wrists after he "lost more than $1 billion of client money, including much, if not all, of his own family's fortune." In the end, he was yet another victim of financial swindler Bernard Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

An unknown but rising number of less wealthy but distinctly well-off workers in the financial field have also killed themselves as a result of the economic crisis -- with less press coverage. Take, for instance, a 51-year-old former analyst at Bear Stearns. Learning that he would be laid off after JPMorgan Chase took over his failed employer, he "threw himself out of the window" of his 29th-floor apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Or consider the 52-year-old commercial real estate broker from suburban Chicago who "took his life in a wildlife preserve" just "a month after he publicly worried over a challenging market," or the 50-year-old "managing partner at Leeward Investments" from San Carlos, California, who got wiped out "in the markets" and "suffocated himself to death."

Beverly Hills clinical psychologist Leslie Seppinni caught something of our moment when she told Forbes magazine that this was "the first time in her 18-year career that businessmen are calling her with suicidal impulses over their financial state." In the last three months, alone, "she has intervened in at least 14 cases of men seriously considering taking their lives." Seppinni offered this observation: "They feel guilt and shame because they think they should have known what was coming with the market or they should have pulled out faster."

Still, it's mostly on Main Street, not Wall Street, that people are being driven to once unthinkable extremes. And while it's always impossible to know the myriad factors, including deeply personal ones, that contribute to drastic acts, violent or otherwise, many of those recently reported are undoubtedly tied, at least in part, to the way the bottom seems to be falling out of the economy.

As a result, reports of people driven to anything from armed robbery to financially-motivated suicide in response to new fiscal realities continue to bubble to the surface. And since only a certain percentage of such acts receive media coverage, the drumbeat of what is being reported definitely qualifies as startling.

Breaking the Bank

In September 2008, a 23-year-old woman from West Norriton, Pennsylvania, robbed a bank, police reported, to pay her rent. According to East Norriton Detective Sgt.