"Veoh is no longer available in HUNGARY. If you are not in HUNGARY or think you have received this message in error, please go to veoh.com and report the issue."

Funny - to report a problem, I need to go to veoh.com; problem is, veoh.com is not accessible. Go Veoh!

Too bad. Or not. Never use veoh. Guess I won't be any time soon.

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a) the number of jobs lost has been relatively flat now for about three months. It's no longer growing.

and

b) it's a horrendous cliche but like all cliches, it's a cliche because it's usually true: it's always darkest before the dawn.

The people who get rich in any economy are the contrarians, because they know that everybody else starts acting emotionally after a while, not logically. It happens in both good and bad times. In good times, you'll see analysts say things like "it's a new world economy" and "recessions are obsolete" and "the safeguards we have now will prevent long-term downturns" - Alan Greenspan even said some of these things. Of course it's not true, and it's usually when you start hearing stuff like that that things fall apart. Because that's when people start trying to make money out of nothing. Greed sets in and the entire economy becomes one big ponzi scheme.

In recessions, it's usually around the time when people start saying "there is no bottom" that we've hit the bottom. When everybody has completely given up, that's when things usually start getting better. One of the reasons is that all those contrarians - many of whom are institutional investors with billions in capital - are just sitting on the sidelines waiting for that moment. It's in their interests to wait until stocks and real estate are at their lowest points before they act. Then they swoop in and take all that money that everybody else left out there for themselves. But that starts things moving in the other direction.

I may sound overly optimistic, but I've lived through a bunch of recessions now, including the 1970's oil crisis, the 1983 recession and the milder recessions we've had more recently. This one is different in some ways but the same in others. And I'm starting to see some of the same things that I saw in those earlier recessions right before we started coming out of them.

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Baby boomers are just part of the problem (rather than save like their parents did, they went hog wild on houses, home equity borrowing, lots of spending, etc.). The smaller coterie of young working adults who now have to support Social Security and Medicare are another (you are seeing this on a smaller scale at GM: fewer employees supporting a huge base of retirees who stopped working at 50-60 but are living until 80).

There will be job growth again, eventually. Typically, after a recession ends, there is a 1-2 quarter "lag" while businesses see if the recovery is "real" before they hire. So, I would guess 2009 is a bust; the economy gets better in 2010, and hiring will start about a year-15 months from now.

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Is anything funnier? I think not.

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