Well, we might as well get this out of the way now. The employment numbers were uniformly horrible. Let’s jump into this cesspool.

First the numbers. From the DOL, initial claims for unemployment insurance were down 16,000 to 614,000 while the four-week moving average declined 2,750 to 615,250. That, of course, is not the big news. That comes from the BLS and they reported that 467,000 jobs were lost in June. The unemployment rate stayed about the same at 9.5%. This is a major setback as it reverses a trend of declining rates of job losses. These charts from the BLS pretty much tell the story.

This from the Curious Capitalist puts this recession in its awful perspective.

Here are the reactions of economists on the WSJ Real Time Economics Blog:

This was a very ugly labor market report, and there is no amount of lipstick that can improve its image. Indeed, not only does it suggest that the pace of job losses in the U.S. remains very high, it bucks the trend of four consecutive months of improvement in the pace of job losses. Moreover, with conditions in the U.S. economy continuing to be very weak, there is little to suggest that a turnaround in U.S. labor market conditions is on the horizon. –Millan L. B. Mulraine, TD Securities
• Yes, the drop in payroll employment has moderated from the 700,000+ results reported over the winter when panic and paralysis was the order of the day.