Two Things...

Two things are really starting to bug me.

1) If I hear the phrase “Greek debt contagion” one more time I’m going to lose it. Debt is not contagious! That’s like saying obesity is contagious. Portugal, Italy, Spain, etc. are having problems because they spent too much! Not because Greece is having problems. Nobody’s pointing it out, but the UK’s deficit as a percentage of GDP is actually higher than Greece, and the US isn’t far behind. We should stop looking at Europe and start trying to fix things here at home.

2) Apparently, employers added 224,000 jobs (annualized) but the unemployment rate jumped to 9.9%. Huh? They say more people are actively looking for a job. Maybe, but it sounds more like spin to me. If they said something like we had a “net increase” in jobs, then I would be more prone to believe them. For now, it almost seems as if they have conveniently started reporting only jobs created, without mentioning the number of jobs lost during the same period. Look, we added 224,000 new jobs…aren’t we awesome! but, shhhhh, we also lost 300,000 jobs that we won’t tell you about...