Your Friday Morning Dose of Doom & Gloom

Not. Good. Enough.

That’s about all you can say about today’s jobs report. It would be a nice jobs report, a decent jobs report, maybe even a better-than-expected jobs report — if it came, say, in Year Three of a real recovery. But we never did get the sustained 250,000-500,000 new jobs per month that we should have, coming out of the recession.

Result: If you count discouraged workers who have given up looking for work, the unemployment rate today wouldn’t be a lousy 8.5% — it would be a shocking 10.9%.

And that’s the real unemployment rate: Worse than one in ten able-bodied workers. If you include the underemployed — folks who would take full-time work if they could get it — the really real rate is 15.2%, or one in six.

Meanwhile, Goldman-Sachs says the 200,000 net new jobs figure is really only 158,000, due to temporary hiring of Christmas couriers. January will have to come back roaring to make up for another 42,000 temp jobs that have already gone away.

Not. Good. Enough.